A Personal Reflection on my Blog Network

I plan to divert a little from the assigned topic on blog networks for Week 7 of FOC08. This post will be a little longer than usual too. Please indulge me.

I’ve been blogging on an off since April, 2005. When contemplating this task, I began to reflect on my own experiences over the last three and a half years, and wonder whether my own blog is insular or part of some wider network.

In one sense, I feel that it’s quite insular – a lone voice in the ether where I add tid-bits of information and collect random thoughts. I wouldn’t be the first blogger to wonder: if a blog falls in the forest …

I’ve received only just more than a handful comments over this time. My blog doesn’t receive a lot of traffic – somewhere in the vicinity of 350 page views per month. And from what I can tell, there are just a few repeat visitors – mostly from some of my ‘real life’ friends like Nick and Marty. I guess this is in itself a small network or blogging community. It allows me to keep tabs on Nick as he is bobbing across the Atlantic and still feel someway connected to him. It also let’s me discover what delicious vegetarian recipes Marty has concocted and how his running is going.

On the other hand, I keenly feel how connected my blog has allowed me to be in a much wider network and community. As a direct result of blogging I have formed a number of significant relationships and joined a number of new networks.

Before I started blogging, I was following another of my ‘real-life’ friends Tony. He is friends with Johnnie and Hugh. From there, I started following other blogs and following threads that interested me. A lot of these are listed in my blogroll.

As a consequence of following, reading, absorbing, learning – I began to reorient my career towards the things I was becoming more interested in – the intersection of technology and the human side of business.

From Johnnie’s blog, I discovered Anecdote and
after reading and responding to a post on their blog, I ended up working with them. Perhaps I’m biased, but I think the Anecdote blog is one of the best examples of a niche business blog on the web. I witnessed first hand the power of building a community around that blog and the brand. I have learnt a great deal from reading it and from Shawn and Mark who write it.

My work with Anecdote extended my network and connections with other bloggers – like Nancy White, Patrick Lambe, James Robertson and Matt Moore whose work (and blogs) I admire a lot.

I was fortunate to be able catch up with Johnnie in person when he visited Melbourne on holidays recently. With Tony, we enjoyed a casual lunch by the river and chatted for a long while.

That meeting felt like a fateful event – like I’d come full circle and connected some loose ends.

Johnnie commented (I’m para-phrasing here and hopefully not talking out of step) that he also sensed a ‘community’ of like-minded people that share similar values about their work that have managed to make connections across the blogosphere. Relationships and connections which are complex, multi-dimensional, intertwined and have manifested in many different ways.

What we have by definition is the same social network: a social structure made of nodes that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, friendship etc.

I also find Downes’ argument compelling, and a useful way of describing the phenomenon that I’m trying to explain:

The community is the network. There is no centralized place that constitutes community, there are only people, and resources, that are distributed, that are all acting on their own behalf and in their own interests … where the network consists of a set of self-selected relations using a variety of contextual information … to establish meaning, and where this meaning not only defines the community but emerges from the community.

I also belong to the Melbourne blogging community. I use the term quite loosely here, but by following other local bloggers such as Cameron, Michael and others, I’ve ended up at a number of face-to-face meetings organised by other Melbourne bloggers and digital media folks and have met a lot of great people. Regular ‘community’ events take place, and I maintain contact with a number of people I’ve met through this network.

Of course, I also belong to a very big network or community of people who choose to blog – the
blogosphere. Getting philosophical: can we not agree as people, to be part of the whole? Quantumly aren’t we all related?

Blogging has also lead to my interest in using other tools and social media, del.icio.us, flickr, podcasts, facebook, twitter – each of which has increased the number of loose connections or weak ties that I have in my network. In turn, there have been many instances where these links have lead to participation in social events, conferences and work collaborations. Most importantly it has created interesting conversations.

When I pause to think about this, I find it quite amazing.

Buddha said: “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.”

Through blogging, I guess I have made my own world. It has lead me to make fundamental changes to the work I do and the approach I take to it. It has also extended my personal and social network beyond the boundaries of where I was once comfortable. I am grateful for the opportunities it has afforded me and for the meaning it has created.

They opened themselves up to question and scrutiny, but by doing so they achieved transparency, alignment, openness and trust … What kind of leaders would open themselves up to such vulnerability in order to see hierarchical structure (ie power) crumble away?

He cites Bonny Cheuk listing the qualities of what she termed Leardership 2.0:

• employee-centric
• listen and value every staff’s inputs
• ready to be surprised
• tolerate mistakes
• hear what you may not like to hear
• genuine dialogues with employees
• willingness to let go of leader’s authority
• leaders have to participate, not delegate

Fantastic! This is the kind of stuff that gets me really excited – the intersection between technology and human potential!

Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008: Clay’s talk centers on the notion that in today’s modern society, there is a massive cognitive surplus, or untapped source of brain power. He tries to debunk the often heard phrase aimed at technophiles and ‘geeks’ — “where do people find the time?”

In his presentation he cites some staggering statistics, which are not only compelling on their own, but support his argument well. He calculated the amount of time American’s watch TV to be in the vicinity of 200 billion hours per year, which is equal to 200 wikipedia projects per year. Imagine what we could achieve if we re-directed this type of energy — use this surplus in a more positive way? A thought provoking presentation.

Paul Graham at Startup School 08: Paul’s presentation is an interesting look at why start-ups should not worry about the money too much, and act more like a not-for-profit in the early stages. He argues that being benevolent improves moral; helps you to be decisive and makes other people want to help you.

He recommends the adoption of Google’s “don’t be evil” model, and concludes by urging not to be satisfied with simply ‘not being evil’, but to be good! I found one of the best takeaways was the advice: “Cheap to run = Hard to kill”, sage advice for a start-up, even a micro-one like my own.

Anyhow, go see for yourself.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been inspired by reading The Dharma Bums and Kerouac’s rambling, spontaneous prose?  I’m not sure — I do have an urge to write.

I’ve been wondering for a while what to do with this blog and I haven’t completely resolved that yet. I had a thought that I might try and separate work and personal, but I came to the conclusion that this is a tenuous division at best — we take ourselves everywhere we go. If you have any thoughts about this, I’d love to hear them.

So, with that said: enjoy the archives, but expect light blogging here. Thanks for coming.

Whilst I’m not celebrating xmas for any religious reasons, it still can be a holiday to celebrate a wide variety of things like family, community and love. I hope that you have a safe and happy one!

1. Despite having both Undergrad (BA) and Masters (MBA) degrees, technically I have never passed Year 9 of High School. I switched schools (I was in danger of being kicked out!) and started at y10 at the new school, which commenced the school year in November.

2. I was born at Walsgrave Hospital , Coventry on the 26th December - Boxing Day. I emigrated with my family at the age of 6, arriving in Australia on 20th May 1977.

3. In my mid-late teens I fronted a hard rock / metal band. We played a couple of local gigs and parties, but inevitably we all went our separate ways. I still predominantly listen to Metal — faves being Sabbath (and Ozzy), Metallica, Zepplin, Dio and some local Melbourne stuff thrown in for good measure — although my tastes have matured somewhat with age. Eclectic is probably the best description.

4. I underwent a Gastric lavage procedure after a drug overdose at the age of 5. I had raided the medicine chest and taken a whole heap of aspirin. I also convinced my little brother (who was 3 at the time) to take them too, by crushing them into water. To this day, I still vividly remember the experience!

5. I experienced my fifteen (and only) minutes of fame on TV at the tender age of 12. I was a contestant on Family Feud (Daryl Somers was host). We stayed on for a couple of nights and won a couple of dodgy prizes. I’ve never lived it down. I just hope that it never ends up on YouTube!

I’ll need to give some more thought on who to tag seeing as tough Tony would have been one of my victims and he’s already tagged Pete - so watch this space. Ping me if you’d like to volunteer.

Update: No volunteers, so here are a few people I would love to know more about (some I don’t know at all!). Apologies if you feel like you’ve just been chain-mailed!:

Martin Gleesson, Micheal Specht, Ben Barren, Tejas Patel, Michael D. Pollock

November has been one of the best months I’ve had blogging in terms of my site stats – if you can really read anything into that!  My stats show high numbers for me in terms of ‘unique visits’, and have by far been the best month I’ve had this year for ‘number of visits’.   I think that the stats go to prove one thing – that regularity of posting definitely has a positive effect on the number of people hitting your website.  My Tasmania series of posts probably helped with that.  I had some positive feedback about it too, which is nice.  I enjoyed writing it — it provided me with a welcome distraction from the perils of flying, and having to make sandwiches for the following days trip.   I’ve still got a tassie wrap-up post to write, so stay tuned for that one (I’ll get there eventually).

So, to get things rolling, I wrote a press release for Nick to put up on his site in the hope that I can pay it forward for Nick and generate some traffic and interest in his story. It’s probably a little contrived but I honestly believe that this is a story that will be of interest to others. If you agree with me, please digg it, blog it, help out with some link lovin’ to Nick’s site or contribute in some other way to spreading the word, as far and wide as possible.

I too have spent the last couple of weeks with my head in books, switching off the ‘idiot box’, taking the dog for a walk and spending more time meditating.  I don’t have anything against TV per se, there just seems to be little on it that I find interesting or that entertains me.  The exception to this is Spicks and Specks and RockWiz (Music quiz shows), which I really enjoy.

Reading also makes me want to write more, although to date this hasn’t really translated into keystrokes.  I’ve been reading a fair bit of Beat poetry and the history of the Beat generation, including its influence on music and artists such as Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison.  I’ve got a vague idea about writing an essay of sorts on the similarities of the Beats and bloggers, but I’m still clarifying my thoughts on this.

I also thought that as a consequence of the increased level of reading that I’d be blogging more, but that hasn’t happened either.  Perhaps it’s a case of too much input making it harder to process the information and translating this to output?  There doesn’t seem to be a direct correlation between input and output, that’s for sure.