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 - Please note that this blog is no longer active.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!

I’m back in Vienna - a funny thing happened on the flight back: The plane had already left the boarding gate and rolled to the airfield, when the captain announced that we had to return to the terminal to drop a passenger off who somehow had managed to board the wrong plane… It was no joke - everyone applauded when the guy (a young businessman) walked to the exit. He even turned around, bowed apologizingly and waved good-bye..

Some more thoughts on the GOR 2005:

Apart from what I’ve already mentioned there was another interesting presentation in the session on "Interaction in Online Groups": Thomas Leckner (TU Munich) looked at different reasons why users provide additional information and share opinions with others in online spaces, and connected these motivational aspects (altruism, reciprocity, efficacy, and reputation) to functional requirements of web-based applications. So basically his question was: how to design an application to support the different kinds of motivation? This struck some chords with me because I’m thinking about the relation between Code and blogging practices - how do different elements of blogging software (e.g. trackbacks or "newest blogs"-lists) facilitate the formation of rules and relations? Leckner focused his presentations on e-commerce-platforms, but I’m sure some of his references will be useful for my Weblog studies as well.

On Wednesday morning I chaired the session on "Online & Offline: Relations and Social Networks" with five presentations. It was the toughest conference spot: 9.00 a.m. after the conference party… But the presentations were all worth it, with Monica Whitty (Belfast) speaking on "Cyber Cheating", Gustavo Mesch (Haifa) on different networks of teenagers, Volker Täube (Swiss federal office of statistics) on an analysis of social capital based on the Swiss household panel, Sonja Utz (Amsterdam) on a comparison of phone vs. email use in long-distance friendship [I’m not sure, but I think I participated in one of her surveys..] and Jeff Gavin (Bath) on the use of online & offline channels when using online dating sites.

With the GOR-party on the night before…

… the 9-am-session is really tough

A rather general remark: Maybe I missed it, but I think there was not a lot of discussion about "social software" going on. Apart from the session on weblogs, the sessions on online interaction focussed on "traditional" applications like email or newsgroups. There was no presentation on Wikis, none on social networking tools, none on tagging and folksonomies. Apparently these topics are not (yet?) on the radar of the people who attend GOR - I’ve mentioned that only about 10% percent of the keynote audience had heard of flickr.com before, which might illustrate this point.
Of course, this is not a critique of the presentations, the attendants, or the conference as such. It was just a somewhat weird experience for me, because I’ve spent the last year or so intensively learning about all these new applications, uses and practices - both by reading a lot of related blogs and by talking to a lot of people who are working in this field, at Blogwalks and Blogtalk 2.0, for example. Now, suddenly I find myself at a conference on Online Research where people tell me: "Oh, I’ve heard about Weblogs, but have never seen one. How do they work?".
Again, this is not to say that the conference was bad - actually, out of the three GOR conferences I’ve visited, it was the best one yet! I had a lot of interesting conversations, talked to colleagues I’ve already met and to some I didn’t know before. For example, while I’m writing this post, I’m also exchanging Emails with Monica Whitty on aspects of "Blogging and Online Dating". And there were two conversations in particular which might lead to really interesting projects in the next months, but they are not "bloggable" yet..