Bamblog

Achtung - das Bamblog wird seit Mitte Oktober 2007 nicht mehr aktualisiert. Bitte besuchen Sie mein neues Weblog unter http://www.schmidtmitdete.de. Danke! - Please note that this blog is no longer active. You can find my new blog at http://www.schmidtmitdete.de. Thanks for visiting!

Ulf-Dietrich Reips, the local GOR organizer, told me yesterday that he linked to my Blog on the GOR Homepage, so there might be some GORites coming to this site - I should post at least some of my notes from yesterday…

Andreas Weigend’s keynote touched a couple of interesting issues - he described the main motivation of his work as "to empower individuals and organizations to make better decisions based on analysis of behavioral data". He argued that situational variables are far more predictive than customer attributes - so rather than building sociodemographic profiles of your users through lengthy survey, E-commerce-companies (for example) should rather ask them: "what do you plan to do right now?" and combine this situational data with Session data - looking at Server stats, basically. Amazon uses a lot of user-generated data to fine-tune their sites - and of course they are closely watching recent developments in collaborative tagging and folksonomies. Andreas Weigend demonstrated applications like Flickr, del.icio.us and 43things during his keynote to show some of the potential these collaborative tools have - interestingly, only about 5 to 10 percent of the keynote audience had heard of flickr before…
At the end of his speech, he announced an interesting competition - I have to get the slides of his presentation and will post the competition here as well.

There were about 30 - 40 people in the session on "Social uses of weblogs" which followed the keynote - I did a quick survey at the beginning of my presentation; about 5 or 6 run their own blog, and about 10 to 15 follow other blogs, so the crowd was quite different from the people attending BlogTalk, for example. But the session was quite good and provided an interesting mix of perspectives:

Martin Welker (Leipzig) talked about "Blogging and Journalism"; his key argument was that disputing the question "Is blogging journalism" is not helpful, so he shifted the focus on "what do journalists do with Blogs?" - using them not only as publication tool, but also as an instrument for research and checking information. Nicola Döring (Ilmenau) presented some basic data on Moblogging and its functions, while Rasco Perschke and Maren L�bcke (TU Hamburg) talked about some of their work with the project on "Communication-Oriented Modelling (COM)" (the same group Prof. Schlieder from Bamberg is working in - see this post for some remarks on the general approach). My presentation followed next, and I guess it was an interesting contrast of two different sociological approaches to Blogging - theirs is focussed on formally modelling communication processes (not only in Blogs) and draws ideas from Niklas Luhmann, while I look at blogging practices and structuration with ideas of Giddens and H�flich coming into play. It would be very worthwhile to see where we could connect our approaches, but unfortunately I haven’t seen Rasco and Maren since Lunch yesterday. I guess I have to email them..
Jinsun Lee (Rutgers University) gave the final presentation; she focussed on "Ohmynews", a Korean online newspaper which takes the idea of "citizen journalism" very serious (link is to the "international issue"). They have a staff of about 60 editors, but over 33.000 "news guerillas" - citizen reporters who cover events and provide opinion on current issues. While "Ohmynews" is technically not a Weblog, it shares a lot of the ideas behind Blogging - giving individual people a voice on the net, facilitating "bottom-up journalism" and encouraging reader’s feedback.

Some more bits on the GOR dinner and party last night, the other sessions, and thoughts about the conference in general will follow, but I’m quite hungry right now..

Jinsun Lee and Adam Joinson, the session chair