Employee blogging: personal or work-related?
That’s the title of a great presentation that Lilia Efimova held via Skype at ECSCW07 in Limerick. Be sure to look at the slides if you’re interested in the subject.
Back from Telematica
Excuse the rather long silence - as ends-of-the-month go, August was a busy one. I’m still in the process of finishing two papers and fighting a rather annoying cold, but with the great research input I got over the last two days I am certainly not complaining.
To recap: Lilia Efimova invited me to hold a talk on corporate blogging at the Telematica Instituut in Enschede, which is only about 2.5 hours from where I do my work. We got in touch through our blogs and given that we both research corporate blogging it felt totally natural to get together and pick each other’s brains. I keep finding again and again that few things really connect people quite the same way that nerdy research interests do.
Lilia introduced me to Anjo Anjewierden, who (among many other thing) works on ways of visualizing blog data and has developed the very nifty text analysis package tOKo. I also met bloggers Ton Zijlstra and Elmine Wijnia with whom I had the chance to chat after the talk. I’m always vastly impressed by people who have been blogging for several years. Me, I tend to feel proud that I’ve managed to post in more or less regular intervals for roughly a year now, but a year seems so little compared with all the writing that many of the “veterans” have under their belts.
Check out the slides for the talk:
Anjo made an excellent point after the presentation by asking what a flog is (I use the word in the title of the presentation). Note to self: it’s a good idea to occasionally explain the neologisms that you carelessly throw about.There’s quite a bit of trip-associated homework that I need to do today, but I promise to post more on some of the things I have been pondering lately very soon. Thanks once more to Lilia, Robert and Alexander for letting me stay at their place and for wining and dining me! I’m looking forward to hosting you (ideally all of you, but for that I need a bigger apartment) in the future. 
Research into corporate blogging at Microsoft
While there is the occasional market research study into the adoption of blogs in corporate contexts and people are even thinking about metrics for measuring their success, things are still fairly lacking when it comes to in-depth academic research into what effect blogs have both on organizations and on how they are perceived. But that’s slowly changing. I’ve picked up these two very interesting articles recently, describing the use and acceptance of corporate blogs:
Efimova, L., & Grudin, J. (2007). Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging. Proceedings of the Fortieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press. [pdf]
Kelleher, T., and Miller, B. M. (2006). Organizational blogs and the human voice: Relational strategies and relational outcomes. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), article 1. [html]
The focus in both articles is on employee blogs, which I find to be perhaps the most interesting subtype of company blogs for several reasons. If you are thinking about implementing blogs internally, have a look (and consider this as well).
On a side note: I never realized that Lilia Efimova has a blog (though in retrospect it seems fairly absurd to have assumed she doesn’t) and that it’s full of fascinating research on blogging at Microsoft (seriously Heather, you could have let me know*). That, and I find the way she uses flickr to annotate visualizations quite neat. Hmm, something new for my repertoire and Google Reader…
* I’m kidding of course. I have heard that quite a few people work at Microsoft (and Microsoft Research). I just thought I should ping you, the Microsoft blogger, about the article on Microsoft blogging. 
