Blogging thoughts: personal publication as an online research tool

Abstract

Once upon a time, weblogs were automatically collated overviews of data about visitors to a web server. That's changed. Nowadays the texts called weblogs are definitely not written by a computer. Weblogs today are subjective annotations to the web rather than statistics about it. Weblogs, or blogs as they are affectionately termed, are frequently updated websites, usually personal, with commentary and links. Link lists are as old as home pages, but a blog is far from a static link list or home page. A blog consists of many relatively short posts, usually time-stamped, and organised in reverse chronology so that a reader will always see the most recent post first. The first weblogs were seen as filters to the Internet; interesting links to sites the reader might not have seen, often with commentary from the blogger. Though weblogs have many different themes, looks and writing styles, formally the genre is clear. Brief, dated posts collected on one web page are the main formal criteria. Evan Williams, one of the crea- tors of the popular blogging tool Blogger, is succinct in his definition: To me, the blog concept is about three things: Frequency, Brevity, and Per- sonality. (..) This clarification has evolved over time, but I realised early on that what was significant about blogs was the format not the content.1 This paper is about the use of weblogs in research. We are both re- searchers of online games, texts and culture, and most of our material is gathered online. A lot of our research is done online. Unsurprisingly, we came across weblogs when surfing the net. Discovering how simple Blogger makes blogging, we started our own weblogs. Jill Walker started jill/txt in October 2000, and Torill Mortensen started Thinking with my fingers not long after. The weblogs were originally used as a way to keep our focus while online, serving as constant little reminders of the real topics we were supposed to write about. They soon developed beyond be- ing digital ethnographers' journals and into a hybrid between journal, aca- demic publishing, storage space for links and site for academic discourse. Today our weblogs are among the most popular channels for frequent exchange of information between the members of what Mark Bernstein, Chief scientist at Eastgate Systems and writer of a weblog bearing his own name,2 dubbed 'The Scandinavian-flavoured cluster' of weblogs concerned with online communication and games.3 The generous spirit of blogging permits the writer to leave behind what Anders Fagerjord so fittingly names a Surftrail4 for others to follow through the World Wide Web, di- recting colleagues and others who might come by to areas of interest. And it's a trail annotated with everything from short comments, as is typical of Lisbeth Klastrup in Klastrup's Cataclysms5, to longer descriptions or even reviews, as is the style of Anja Rau's less frequent posts in her Flickwerk.6 Where home page remains a fixed noun, the word blog has rapidly become a verb as well. Bloggers have been likened to journalists, or perhaps better, editors; they might as well be compared to researchers. To blog is an activity similar in many ways to the work of the re- searcher. A weblogger filters a mass of information, choosing the items that interest her or that are relevant to her chosen topic, commenting upon them, demonstrating connections between them and analysing them.