Skip to main content

Using the Blog as an online research tool

I usually don't like meta-blogging (blogging about the concept of blogs), because a lot of other people do it .

But today John Udell raised an interesting example of interaction between (in lack of a better general term) enthusiasts as a result of the openness of the web (all the web2.0 thingies like blogs and podcasts, their links, comments and trackbacks). This reminded me of that I dared to write "I've experimented with the use of a blog as an online research tool" in the Method-chapter in my thesis, and continued:
While it lacks structure and rigorousness of this thesis, the blog is still chronological through time, and in a way, it represents the research in a more honest way. It also performs the role of a dynamic research tool, as updated resources are available through my blogroll and linkroll.
Kristin Helen was the fellow-CMS enthusiast that opened my eyes for getting away with this (by pointing me to this document (1), and now she has in fact published an entire master thesis (2) about it! Congratulations :)

Now, how did the blog affect my research?

Primarily, it's a notebook. Its a place for me where I can note down stuff before I forget about it.

It's also a way to get feedback. A blog quickly attracts other enthusiasts due to the transparency of the open web (web2.0, ugh), depending on the activity of the blogger (see below). Like in Udell's example, I've found trackbacks to my own posts, whose blogs again have posts with interesting comments from other bloggers who I subscribe to and so on and so forth. I didn't get too many comments over the last few months, but I did get invited to a conference, and got some hints and nudges. It is also somewhat motivating to see traffic on yer blog, which means that somebody in the world actually take an interest in what you're researching for your master's (I know some other thesi that don't enjoy this interest).

How to do it?

To get into the blogosphere and get yer researchin' started, do the following:

  • Write. Do it regularly and write interesting/relevant stuff on one topic (use tags if you write on several topics). It's more tempting to subscribe to a stable blog.
  • Read. Use Bloglines or another feed-aggregator every day. As an example of the daily digest: these are my subscriptions
  • Comment. When you comment you leave a link back to your own blog, which is probably about a related topic. The author of the blog where you commented is likely to have a look at yours.
  • Trackback. Write about what other people write about. I doubt John Udell will notice that this post is a trackback of his post (he probably gets a hundred trackbacks every day), but maybe Kristin will? (no offense :D )
  • Search and surf. Check out technorati and del.icio.us for blogs on similar subjects.

So the thing you have to figure out is how big a limit you should put on your blog-activity. I spend half-an-hour reading through my subscriptions (comment when I find something particularly interesting, trackback when I find something immensely interesting), and write ~1 post a week, which takes 10-30 minutes.

(1) Mortensen, T., Walker, J. 2002, "Blogging thoughts:personal publication as an online research tool", Researching ICTs in Context, Intermedia/UniPub, ch. 11, p. 249-279

(2) Andersen, K. H. 2004, "Student’s Use of Weblogs: Weblogs for Collaboration in an Educational Setting" Department of Information Science, University of Bergen, Norway


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant...
6 comments
Read more

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE  in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Git Users Mailing List

A year ago or so, I came across the Git-user mailing list (aka. "Git for human beings"). Over the year, I grew a little addicted to helping people out with their Git problems. When the new git-scm.com webpage launched , and the link to the mailing list had disappeared, I was quick to ask them to add it again . I think this mailing list fills an important hole in the Git community between: The Git developer mailing list git@vger.kernel.org  - which I find to be a bit too hard-core and scary for Git newbies. Besides, the Majordomo mailing list system is pretty archaic, and I personally can't stand browsing or searching in the Gmane archives. The IRC channel #git on Freenode, which is a bit out-of-reach for people who never experienced the glory days of IRC. Furthermore, when the channel is busy, it's a big pain to follow any discussion. StackOverflow questions tagged git , these come pretty close, but it's a bit hard to keep an overview of what questio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be...
1 comment
Read more

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config...
Post a Comment
Read more