A great conference that I’ll probably miss (ICWSM, Boulder)
In case you’re interested in what researchers from a number of academic disciplines are doing with blogs (things such as social network analysis, how we use language in blogs etc): check out the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) that will take place in Boulder, Colorado, March 26 to 28.
It promises to be a very exciting conference, especially since it has both a strong academic line-up and a number of very interesting speakers from major media and tech companies (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and Nielsen, to name just a few). Scott Nowson is giving a presentation, danah boyd is an invited speaker and I’m especially curious about a presentation entitled Building Trust with Corporate Blogs by Paul Dwyer.
Frankly, I was in shock when I first heard about the event only about a week ago. Blog researchers from all over the world will meet in Colorado to discuss their data, methods and to-date findings, as well as the implications of the social media for companies, governments and society as such. This is not some promotional fluff-fest either: the vast majority of presentations are concerned with empirical research - comparing notes with others who, like me, are investigating blogs would be immensely valuable for my thesis project.
So why am I (probably) not going? Quite simply - lack of funds. I have been invited to present at four conferences this year: the DGfS meeting in Germany next week, the IPra in Sweden, the WebGenres Colloquium in Britain and finally the SIGET in Brazil, and though I have some support from the university I am covering most of the costs myself. The schedule may look like I have enough on my hands already, but the input from a good conference is simply invaluable, especially when you’re dealing with something largely unexplored such as the social media. ICWSM is unique in that it is specifically about blogs and thus it’s something I really can’t miss.
I must have buried my head too deep in the sand lately (the sand being my f-score stuff), because I somehow managed to overlook the whole event up to now. If I hadn’t I certainly would have submitted something there.
Now, in the unlikely case that you happen to know a potential sponsor willing to support a highly motivated PhD student whose resources are sadly outpaced by his passion for research, please contact me. Of course I would gladly write a detailed report to outline how ICWSM relates to my research and what my preliminary results look like. A collaboration with a company involved in blogging would be interesting for me in other ways as well – for example, to compare internal with public-facing blogs and to assess the practical considerations of corporate bloggers.
