Sunday, June 29, 2008

Some updates

A quick update about some of my recent activities:
  • Last March I participated in a session on SNS at iConference in Los Angeles with danah, Fred, and Alice Marwick. I presented some of our work on social capital and Facebook.
  • I spoke at my alma mater, Annenberg (USC) in March as well. As part of the Virtual Communities Speaker Series associated with their APOC program, I spent a day speaking with faculty and students. The Annenberg Program on Virtual Communities is a new Master's Program being offered by the school which is innovative in many ways.
  • This summer I'll be in Northern California for a few weeks, working and visiting with family here. On Friday I spoke to HP's Social Computing Lab and Tuesday (July 1) I will visit Facebook and present the research I have been doing with Charles Steinfield and Cliff Lampe. I am also planning to speak at a panel on Web 2.0 technologies at the CRA Conference at Snowbird.

Monday, June 02, 2008

I blame twitter

I have been abysmal at blogging recently, and I blame twitter. Now that summer is here, I am going to try to be more active. Fred Stutzman has posted some thoughtful insights about twitter, and I'll echo some of his ideas here. I think the two reasons I have been twittering and not blogging boil down to:
1. Knowledge of who my audience is when I blog
2. Limited amount of text on twitter
Not having a sense of who is reading is disconcerting and makes me less likely to try to fit blogging into an already busy day. Which relates of course to point 2 - the time commitment needed to maintain a vibrant blog seems beyond my capacities at the moment. Especially when it would take time away from actually getting research published. 140 characters is just so addictive and so effortless. On the other hand, twitter posts are ephemeral in two ways - they disappear (for the most part) and don't seem to be indexed by google. Thus my decision to try to maintain both modes of broadcasting, plus the occasional facebook status update, and to focus on the blog as a way to update folks about my activities and engage in pre-scholarship that will lead to published, peer-reviewed research. Wish me luck!