Information Visualization: What's a blog

December 26, 2005

What's a blog - WYSIWYG

This is a running post: Updated 22 July, 2006

Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers, 7/19/2006
The ease and appeal of blogging is inspiring a new group of writers and creators to share their voices with the world.
A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology. Blogs, the survey finds, are as individual as the people who keep them. However, most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression – documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family. continue reading the PEW Report

"E-marketer presents some good data related to why people blog, how often, and how they are viewed by their readers, take a look!"

A key finding of the survey is that the blogger respondents are, to a large degree, seeking to position themselves as authorities in their field. That was the number one reason they gave for blogging. [source: Blogs and Business from E-marketer, by Kim Phelan on November 7, 2005]

Blogs allow us to get our message out to the world in a direct, unmediated, and unfiltered way.
— Tim Bray, Sun Microsystems

[quoted in Does Your Company Belong in the Blogosphere?]

News:Based on the Technorati queries part of their study, it seems that the most commonly-used blogging platforms are:

blogspot 44%
msn 23%
livejournal 8%
aol 1%
splinder 1%
20six 1%
typepad 1%
blog 1%
fc2 1%
hatena 1%
Source: Blogger, MSN etc: which blogging system's most popular?

Information visualizationists will say: WYSIWYG (or "what you see is what you get")
And there is another side in such a perspective. Let's not over look:

"Seeing is believing", as the saying goes, and when people use their avatar to explore inside of a graphical world, they tend to suspend disbelief more easily. The brain is used to visual data above all other senses - vision provides the overwhelming amount of data to the brain. Bartle argues that text is better at the suspension of disbelief ... I would argue just the opposite - that graphics overwhelms the senses and can easily suspend disbelief. [source]

By the way, seeing and believing in physical world is easy to understand. In virtual (synchronous) world, it is gaining acceptability. Whereas, in spiritual domain, this is a matter of personal and individual outlook.

The netizens, experience, these in the process of visualization.
You may like to call it metaphor, figure of speech, slimily, analogy, allegory, etc. Nevertheless, I found an interesting example:
Blog as windows, bridges and cafes:
Wherein,

Windows (social changes)
self-expression
tolerance
individualism
free information ...

Bridges (society)
connecting between different divided societies, social islands
immigrants – non-immigrates ...

Cafes (politics)
Ideal speech situation – equal power for everyone ... source

(~~~~)Survey of the Biblioblogosphere: Why we blog:
I received 116 responses to the open ended question “why do you blog?” Instead of presenting every answer to you, I went through and categorized them by the different goals one would have for blogging. Many of the answers fit into more than one category. Here are the reasons why we blog:

To share ideas with other/to communicate with colleagues, friends, family: 47 (40.5%)
To record ideas for self/to keep current: 28 (24.1%)
To network/to build community: 22 (19%)

A word of wisdom about 'what to expect' and 'what not to' from Blogs: It's a blog's life
(~~~~)[Those who forget history will be forced to...]
December 22, 2005
How the read/write web was lost...
The idea of a read/write web had been motivating the work of many hypertext developers like TBL long before the web was born. But, the last 10 years experience with the largely "read-only" web has caused many people to forget that the original idea was to create a writeable, creative space -- not just a network of things to be read. Fortunately, the growth of blogging is finally causing the renaissance of the read/write web. What we don't understand, I think, is how the original idea of the read/write web could have been "lost" -- even temporarily.
(~~~~)Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool?, by By Susannah Gardner

"If you’re new to the blogosphere, new to blogging or just want to freshen up your knowledge, this is a good read." suggests Paloma Cruz in Blogging jargon @ stories from a Web Junkie life.

(~~~~)See also: Sifry's Alerts, State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth
See also: Peekablog: Blogs, Visualization, and Tufte
Submitted by webfanatic on Thu, 2005-01-27 10:12.
Most important is Rajesh Setty's Blogging Starter Checklist
(~~~~) Link policy and building traffic, from What's Your Brand Mantra?
Maintaining a blog is a lot like having a child (I don't have one, but I can imagine.) It takes a lot of time, nurturing and care. It's not as easy as asking a bunch of bloggers if they'd put your link on their site. So I suppose to sum up this post on driving traffic:
1. Compare your blog to others in your space... do your posts sound distinctly "you"? Or could they appear on someone else's blog and no one would know the difference? What unique value are you adding to the blogosphere? This is the "product development" phase.
2. Participate, participate, participate. Give first in order to receive. This is the "marketing" phase.
(~~~~)Blogging and knowledge management: Blogging For knowledge sharing, management and dissemination, Marydee Ojala

In a collaborative work environment, blogs bring significant benefits to enterprises willing to adopt the technology. Writers of blogs, called bloggers, can add to the sum total of knowledge for research projects, share industry and product knowledge, capture and disseminate pertinent news from outside the enterprise, and contribute valuable insights on specific subjects. They are particularly useful for promoting knowledge in cross-cultural environments.

(----)Three Ways for PR Folk to Use Blogs,by Christie Goodman, May 09, 2006: From what I’ve seen, there are three basic ways to use blogs in PR. And they progress from low involvement to high involvement.