Scientific American published the article “Phatic Posts: Even the Small Talk Can Be Big” - where I’m discussing the paper I presented at #WWW2012 on ‘phatic’ communications online: on brief and apparently trivial or mundane updates posted on social media.
For Australian Science online, I published ”Global Web, Society and Knowledge at #WWW2012”, some of my thoughts on workshops, sessions, and presentations as Part I of the #WWW2012 highlights. Part II “Connected and Free: World Wide Web professionals at #WWW2012“ presents random notes and micro-opinion bits, focusing on people, attendants who have been actively participating in this web professionals meeting and their impressions of the conference. I’ve been tweeting before, during, and after the conference, you may check my Twitter stream and the hashtag #WWW2012.

This week Advocacy Global Voices Online published my article, reporting from France, on an inspiring keynote by Tim Berners-Lee (TBL), the inventor of the World Wide Web and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Tim Berners-Lee: Protect the Open Web! #WWW2012

On April 16-20, 2012 the 21st International World Wide Web Conference (#WWW2012) gathered around 2,500 internet and social science professionals, web and mobile technology creators, researchers and scholars, in Lyon, France to discuss matters of global concern for the Internet and the Web. The main themes were “Society and Knowledge” and “The Future Direction of the Web”.

The conference agenda covered both social and technological issues, as well as Internet and democracy, free access to services, freedom of expression, regulation and censorship, control and copyright. The #WWW2012 proceedings are available online, so the many interesting papers can be downloaded. Plenary keynotes videos are also available.

I was a program committee member for a Making Sense of Microposts (#MSM12) workshop. I also presented a research paper on “phatic communication” and why tweets and Facebook updates on weather, food, and mundane life are useful for online communities, human relationships and social networks (I have written about this subject here, here, and here).

“Imagine what you want the world to look like”

But perhaps the major highlight of #WWW2012 was an inspiring keynote on April 18 by Tim Berners-Lee (TBL), the inventor of the World Wide Web and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). He shared insights on the current situation of the web, as well as future directions that could threaten the vitality of the Internet. Rallying the crowd, he said, “Democracy depends on an open internet. Go out in the streets and complain that your democracy is being threatened. (It’s) a duty, something you have to do.”

Tim Berners-Lee gives keynote speech at WWW2012: photo by Danica Radovanovic

TBL touched on the most pressing issues of open data, open government, privacy and control, Net Neutrality, and future generations. As daily blog Demain le Mail (in French) reported:

Le fondateur du web a réalisé un plaidoyer en faveur d’un Internet libre et ouvert. Lors de sa keynote, il a exprimé ses inquiétudes concernant la collecte et l’exploitation des données personnelles. Pour Tim Berners-Lee, la menace vient de principalement de l’industrie et les utilisateurs du web doivent agir et ne pas hésiter à réclamer leurs données personnelles à Facebook ou Google par exemple ».

The founder of the web has made a plea for a free and open Internet. During his keynote, he expressed his concerns regarding the collection and use of personal data. For TBL, the threat comes mainly from industry, and users of the Web must act and not hesitate to claim their personal data from Google or Facebook for example.

TBL insists, as Australian Dejanseo reports, on democratic platforms online, decentralized and open data, as well as the importance of:

the principle of least effort when designing new languages, encouraging the usage of open mobile applications if they don’t like the world of closed systems. He also stressed as in the panel the importance of the openness – open data, suggesting that the UK government needs to understand what open standards are, and urged the same for governments in any country to embrace the movement of open data. Data should be open for public: government statistics, economic, social, demographic, non-sensitive related to democracy and political debate.

Speaking about the openness and the applications accessible to all, TBL  points the finger at Apple, without naming it. E. Delsol writes about it:

Face aux apps d’Apple, de Google et des autres, le W3C milite pour le développement des web apps – open mobile web apps -, ces applications créées avec html5 et accessibles depuis n’importe quel navigateur, sur n’importe quel système. Tout internaute peut accéder à l’ensemble des applications disponibles en ligne. Il enjoint les développeurs dans la salle : “La solution est entre vos mains : développez des web apps, pas des apps !”

Faced with apps from Apple, Google and others, W3C campaigns for the development of web apps – open mobile web apps – these applications created with HTML5 and accessible from any browser on any system. Anyone can access all the applications available online. He urged the developers in the room:“The solution is in your hands: develop web apps, not apps!”

A comment [fr] by “Open Africa” on an 01.Net article agrees with TBL’s statements and reflects on the efforts for remaining the openness in Africa as well:

Je souhaite souvent que le web reste ouvert à la créativité des utilisateurs de tout lieu y compris ceux d’Afrique.Je tiens à féliciter TBL pour ces mises au point claires et virulentes.Nous travaillons beaucoup aussi ici en Afrique de l’Ouest pour avoir une meilleure visibilté sur le net tout en espérant profiter pleinement du réseau pour créer,partager, briller et donner le meilleur de nos talents.

I often wish that the web will remain open to the creativity of users everywhere including those in Africa. Congratulations to TBL for developing these clear and virulent points. We are also working hard here in West Africa for better visibility on the net hoping to take full advantage of the network to create, share, shine and give the best of our talents.

TBL also voiced his opposition to the treaties that advocate increased surveillance and regulation of the Internet, including ACTA.

Some think, including Des Illusion blog, that TBL binds the future of the web and democracy to tightly:

Si nos libertés sur le Web sont certes menacées ou malmenées par des politiques gouvernementales répressives (SOPA, PIPA, Hadopi) pressées par des lobbies industriels et économiques ; il ne faut pas oublier que le Web n’est qu’un des supports de communication existant dans l’espace public démocratique, et non l’unique. Le web est une technologie et non un droit, ni une liberté, même si il devient le moyen d’échange prépondérant d’idées entre individus par une infinité d’outils : blogs, mails, chat, réseaux sociaux… Dans les pays arabo-musulmans, le web a joué le rôle d’un facilitateur par ses outils, permettant une mobilisation rapide et massive des protestataires au Caire, à Tunis ou à Tripoli ; mais il n’a jamais fait la révolution. Une révolution ne se fait pas avec des machines, mais avec les hommes qui sont derrière.

If our freedoms on the Web are threatened or abused by repressive government policies (SOPA, PIPA, Hadopi) pushed forward by business and industry lobbies, one should not forget that the Web is only one existing communication media in the democratic public space, not unique. The web is a technology, not a right or a freedom, even if it becomes the dominant medium of exchange of ideas between individuals of infinite tools: blogs, emails, chat, social networks… In the Arab-Muslim countries, the Web has played the role of a facilitator by its tools, allowing a rapid and massive mobilization of protesters in Cairo, Tunis and Tripoli, but never made the revolution. A revolution is not made with machines, but by the men who are behind.

As someone strictly opposed to bills that advocate increased surveillance of the Internet, threaten basic freedoms on privacy, expression and the access to information, TBL asked the audience to:

…spend 90% of our time doing cool stuff, invent new things [...], but the remaining 10% go to protect the open Web infrastructure on which all this is built. Because otherwise we cannot innovate, because the platforms will be closed, because service providers will control traffic.

Obviously we all need to reflect individually on these present critical issues in our society and embrace collectively actions that will foster the growth, stability, and healthy, open and neutral eco system of the Internet. Since democracy depends on the open internet – so the human discourse depends on the open internet as well, with the massive engagement where everyone gets involved.

(cross-post)

You can read the paper in CEUR online database; I would be happy to read your thoughts and comments here. Check out the paper (pdf), it is available for downloading and reading as part of CEUR Vol-838.

Find my slides uploaded on a SlideShare.

Phatic Posts: Even the Small Talk Can Be Big  

Social media and micro-blogging have been fascinating to me ever since I first encountered them. In the last 3-4 years there has been an enormous growth in social network sites and in the numbers of people using them, especially on the two most popular services, Facebook and Twitter.

That fascination grew to become a doctoral research focus that has explored the different forms of communication dynamics being formed online. I was, in particular, curious why people post trivial, mundane updates and messages to each other – a behavior I have come to term “phatic posts”. It’s not just young people, but also professionals from different walks of life as well as internet researchers, including myself.

I used to tweet from the airplane before taking off, or being alone at the airport at 5am checking into Twitter to see if anyone’s awake in “my time zone’’, or logging in to my Flickr account to see if someone commented on my latest photography. I was not the only one engaging in such behavior; au contraire, many internet researchers and geeky people I know would demonstrate similar patterns of online processes.

“Phatic” is a term used primarily in linguistics, to describe the grunts and nods that are given as a sense of indicating that the lines are open for communication and interaction between two sides, two nodes, sender and receiver. One of the most interesting outcomes of this research thread debunks the old theories of scientists such as the anthropologist Malinowski who claimed that phatic expressions don’t have any practical purpose or meaning. For example, research by Pear Analytics in 2009 described phatic communication messages as “pointless babble” to outsiders to the broadcaster’s social network.

Social media provide an expressive channel for sharing our feelings, needs, current status, or simple statements. Those simple and short statements can carry light information about the food you are eating, about the weather, what film are you currently watching and so on. They can also provoke communication: “anyone there?”, “does anyone know…?”, etc.

On the other side there are applications driven by small micro posts (built by social networks) that enable the creation of phatic posts in the form of micro blogs (Twitter statuses), Facebook updates, signal indications of “like”, “poke”, Flickr comments and fav’s of the photos, Instant messenger signals in the form of emoticons and wide variety of smileys.

It turns out that the mundane, brief messages that you tweet are not meaningless at all. I came to very interesting conclusions that I have presented in a paper prepared for the 2012 World Wide Web conference in Lyon. In contrast to earlier authors, the research showed that phatic posts do contain information messages, signals, values of staying up-to-date with micro and macro world of events and news, flirt, chat, public expressions of everyday life and emotions among the participants (affection, hate, anger, and so on). Their contents has some elements of meaning but their main relevance is to denote something: interaction, connected presence and fostering and maintaining connections.

As any other human basic needs for connection and togetherness, phatic posts keep both the online and offline communication alive and sustain the life of social network sites, and social media services. They are not trivial as people may think. They hold together and animate social media.

The new paper built on earlier work about microposts, especially some from 2008 on one of its manifestations on Facebook concerning the “Poke” function. Further examining the communication dynamics among young adults in academia on social networks led Dr Bernie Hogan of The Oxford Internet Institute to inspire me to think about small, brief language expressions as “phatic communication’’. After web analysis, observations, and interviews with people both online and offline, I came up with several findings.

Phatic posts (or small talk) in communication processes online are very meaningful because they indicate and imply social recognition, online intimacy by sharing our thoughts and feelings with others, as well as the sociability in online communities. Phatic posts potentially denote a lot more substance and weight to them than the content itself suggests. We may conclude that, in the phatic communication context, the content itself may not be relevant but the “keeping in touch” signal it delivers is crucial.

You can read the paper in CEUR online database; I would be happy to read your thoughts and comments both here and on my blog.

Check out the paper (pdf), it is available for downloading and reading as part of CEUR Vol-838.

(a cross-post)

However, in the paper I am arguing that the stuff you think is pointless and does not have a practical information value - your posts on Facebook and Twitter, the likes, the pokes and the tweets about food, weather, the mundane brief status updates – all turn out to have a vital role and social value  that even merits a new phrase – “phatic-posts”  - which the paper coins.

These phatic posts deliver values of staying up-to-date with a micro and macro world of events and news, flirting, chat and public expressions of everyday life and emotions among the participants. The paper explains multiple effects of phatic posts: social, validation, conflict-avoidance, and others. I won’t reveal everything now.

The paper will be published in the ACM SIG proceedings, and if you are curious this Wordle has a summary of the key words of the paper. I will be presenting this April at WWW12 in Lyon (thanks to DejanSEO who are covering my travel).

Check out the program for the conference, which includes a number of interesting events, keynotes, workshops, and discusssions. If you’re going to WWW12 please ping me as I would like to meet other researchers and authors (probably there will be 1500-2000 people and is hard to meet everyone and run from one track to the other) and it would be nice to meet up with other like-minded internet researchers, practitioners, academics, and business folks.

[note: check updates on the #WWW12 conference and paper presentation]

This interview is a part of an editorial of the magazine. Beginning this January I have had an opportunity and quite a challenge to work as my daylight work/role – as an editor for the magazine, knowledge community, and blogging network. It’s a group of creative people, scientists, researchers, and bloggers gathered mostly from Australia, but also from other world wide places (Canada, UK, US, Europe).  As an editor in chief I have invited world wide science, technology, education, and internet bloggers, writers, and scholars who would like to contribute to Australian Science and join our community starting this March.  If you would like to contribute and be a part of a wider community, feel free to contact me, my email is provided at the end of the Editor’s note.

Here is the interview with Bora, enjoy!

Jean Cocteau once said that the art is science made clear, but what he didn’t indicate is that the science is creating different forms of art including the art of connecting people and communicating science. Bora Zivkovic is a unique, energetic, technologically-savvy, and multidisciplinary scientist, connector, and

 blogger. I met Bora twice: during the Science Online 2009 and Science Online 2010 conference in Raleigh NC, USA, and on many other occasions online, and he would always motivate me with incredible energy and passion for science and people. I would say that Bora is the real science connector, not only communicating and articulating science in its many forms but also connecting people, networks, and the scientific communities world wide.

Born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia (now Serbia), Bora’s studies of veterinary medicine were interrupted by the 1990s war in the Balkans, when he arrived in the USA. He went to graduate school at North Carolina State University where he studied how bird brains measure time of day (circadian rhythms) and time of year (photoperiodism). He started A Blog Around the Clock in 2004 as a prolific science blogger. He was the online Community Manager for the open access journal PLoS ONE. He is now the editor of Scientific American’s blog network, organizes the annual ScienceOnline conference, and is the editor of The Open Laboratory, an annual collection of the best writing from science blogs.

He even interviewed me once, as a host of a series of interviews with various scientists, bloggers, educators, and journalists; and now is my turn to ask Bora questions I always wanted to ask him. I had an opportunity to interview him and here are the questions and perceptive, knowledgeable, and fun responses.

Welcome to Australian Science! Recently the Science Online 2012, #scio12 has finished, and impressions are still spreading online among scientists, bloggers, journalists by sharing blog posts, videos, tweets. How do you feel after this year’s conference? Do you think that some things and social dynamics during this conference have changed comparing to previous conferences? I’ve seen familiar names tweeting online, people I met in person in 2009 and 2010. What has changed in the conference dynamics since then?

We were very aware that growing a meeting by 50% can change the dynamics. We spent the entire year discussing strategies for ensuring that the intimate atmosphere of the meeting does not vanish. I wrote quite a lot about this inmy long blog post after the event, especially about the need to make sure that so many new people feel welcome and instantly included into the community – including all the fun parts of the event. We completely changed the daily schedule in order to foster more informal interractions, we (really, Karyn Traphagen) designed the Cafe Room with this in mind, and we put quite a lot of effort in our communications on the blogs (including my post which was recommended to all to read beforehand), emails and social media, to prepare everybody for the unconference format and for the unique blend of serious discussions and crazy fun of ScienceOnline. For the most part, judging from what people are saying on their blogs and in our feedback forms, we were successful.

You are an influential leader of the scientific blogging network community – I may say – worldwide. You have a lot of experience in the curating, managing, coordinating scientific events, scientific blogs, and online communities. You’ve been organizing the ScienceOnline conference for the past 6 years and also serve as series editor for The Open Laboratory anthology. You’ve worked as PLoS online community manager and now work in the role of Editor at the Scientific American blogs. What are the best strategies for building and maintaining blog network (out of scratch)?

Building a blog network from scratch is actually a wonderful experience – one gets to turn one’s vision into reality. Of course, building a network hosted on the Scientific American website is not exactly “from scratch”, as the power of the brand (as well as the resources of the organization) almost guarantee visibility and traffic from the start. I spent several years as a blogger at Scienceblogs.com so I could experience (and later analyze) many aspects of the community building at that site – definitely insights I used in building the SA network later on. Also, just before Scientific American hired me, I was briefly involved in the planning and early organization of the PLoS Blogs and Scientopia blogs. In both of these, my voice was one of several. At Scientific American I was hired specifically to do this, so I had more freedom to build exactly the kind of network I wanted to.

The key to the success of a network are its people. I had the luxury of having nine long months to think about it. I dug through the archives and started following literally thousands of science blogs. I used Twitter to ask for suggestions for even more blogs, especially blogs that do a particular ‘thing’, e.g,. writing about a particular topic in a particular style. What I was looking for was to assemble a team, rather than produce a “best of” list. I wanted a group of people who will be joy to work with, who will have fun communicating with each other in the backforums and in their blogs’ comment sections, and who will be naturally inclined to feel as members of a community, not just writers for hire.

Of course, there are many people like that, so I also made sure that, within the limits of size and budget, I include quite a lot of diversity. When I say ‘diversity’ I am not talking just about coverage of as many topics and scientific disciplines as we can accommodate, but also diversity in voices. I wanted to have people on the network who can speak to different audiences, so I wanted to find people of varied backgrounds (geography, career path, age, gender, race/ethnicity, etc.), with different writing styles, writing at different “reading levels”, etc, in order to capture as broad and varied audience for the network as a whole. Inclusion of several bloggers who communicate well using media other than text was also very important to me, as art, illustration, video, music, photography, cartoons, animations, infographics and other ways of communicating science are just as important as good text writing for extending our reach and capture new audiences.

It is also important to understand that a blog network is not static. Bloggers come and go. It is OK – life and career sometimes force people to take different directions, which may entail stopping blogging temporarily or permanently, or taking one’s blog in a completely different direction. It is important to make these transitions smoothly without disrupting the community and the overall tone of the network.

As a science blogger and network community manager, what’s the one piece of advice you would give to people who want to curate and manage their local and national blogging communities? And what is your advice to bloggers, scholars, scientists, educators, and journalists who want to write for those scientific online networks? I have noticed that relationships, people and linking matter the most, I would like to hear your thoughts. 

Analyze the audience. Make a vision that fits it (and expands to other audiences you want to attract). Then – ignore personal friendships! Both you and I have thousands of friends in the science blogging circles. Many of them are fantastic bloggers whose blogs I read religiously. Yet I did not invite them to the network because their blogging topics and styles do not fit the vision I have for the network. Some of the bloggers who ended up on the network happen to be my friends, but they are here because of what they do and how they do it. Other bloggers on the network I only first encountered when I started looking around really hard – I liked their writing, I started communicating with them online, perhaps “tested” them on the Guest Blog, and decided they were a good fit. I also deliberately chose a few bloggers who are veterans, people who have experience, reputation and authority, people who can help on a bad day when trolls are all over a bloggers’ comment section, or if there are uncertainties in the troops (and of course, they already have many regular readers who will follow their blogs onto the new hosting network). But most are relatively new or young bloggers who I thought had great talent and potential. Most have more than repaid my trust in them and grew into tremendous forces of high-quality blogging.

You are an avid twitterer and I remember you used FriendFeed a lot. What social web tools are you using these days the most besides Twitter? What social media tools help you now for promoting the work and networking and which one do you use for professional development?

Twitter is still my main social network where I spend the most time and do most of the interraction – this is where I discover stuff, promote stuff, and talk with people. I also post links to most of my bloggers’ posts on my Facebook and Google Plus pages. If interraction there happens, and it often does, I am happy to go there as well to reply, but these are definitely not taking up much of my time. I am only very superficially exploring the worlds of Tumblr, Posterous, Quora and Pinterest, am studiously avoiding LinkedIn (though I have a profile there – and probably everywhere), have pretty much abandoned FriendFeed since it was bought by Facebook, and use other sites (e.g., YouTube and Flickr) mainly as repositories rather than places where I expect to get much interraction. I see quite a lot of potential in Google Plus which, I sometimes joke, is how FriendFeed would look like if it continued developing.

I have a feeling that the new social web paradigm in science, technology and education cannot sustain without building relationships and links. Do you find the human factor and the power of community prevailing over machines and tools we are using? Are we finally getting to the point that despite McLuhan’s “that tools will be using us”, is rather the other way around? 

Yes, of course. It is all about the people. Sure the medium affects the message – different mediums are best for different types of communication – but it is always the people who are doing the communicating. Improvement of the tools over time makes the communication easier and clearer, allowing more and more people to use the tools with technical ease, and with better use of their communications instincts – in some way making that communication more and more honest and “real”.

Many universities and departments worldwide (MIT, Open University UK, Stanford, etc.) as well as publishers (Sage, JSTOR, etc.) are opening themselves more and more to the scientists and scholars enabling them to publish directly their research and work and also let the public to some previously locked archives available online. How do you see the impact of open access on the science, education, and communication online? 

Open Science (including, but not limited to, Open Access publishing) is a necessity. It will happen no matter what we do or don’t do. The business realities, the technological capabilities, the will of the people, the habits of media use by next generation, all of those are conspiring to make Open Science a reality in the near future. The question is, how near is that “near future”? We – the Open Science advocates – push for the transition to happen faster. Why? Because every day that medical information is hidden or expensive is a day someone dies. Every day that climate information is not easily available is another day that politically motivated obstructionists can keep swindling people into believing incredible conspiracy theories, and thus another day we postpone action that is needed to protect the planet so it is still inhabitable for our children and grandchildren. Thus, understandable urgency.

Some people may not know but you are also a chronobiologist. So according to you what are the best times for scholars, bloggers, and scientists to write? When is the best time for writing based on our biological rhythms? Many writers say it is very early morning they do the most of their writing, while others swear to late night writing sessions. What do the science and chronobiology say? 

The beauty of biology is the endless variation. Add culture and ingrained habits into the mix and variation of human experience becomes almost endless. There is a continuum of genetically influenced types, ranging from extreme morning people (larks) to extreme night people (owls) and everything in-between, with some people more forcefully affected by their genetics, while others being able to be more flexible with their daily routines. So each person has to discover his/her own best daily schedule. As for publishing? Morning and noon EST seem to work best for the traffic to blog posts regardless of the actual geographical location of the author, and Tuesday seems to be the best day of the week. Tweets apparently do best i.e., most retweets, after 5pm and on Friday night! Who knows why?!

Also, as an editor and manager of The Scientific American blogging network, do you find a time to write?  How much time a day/week do you spend on your blog? 

I have much less time to write now than before. I only get to write 2-3 lengthy, detailed posts per month now, though I post a lot of updates, linkfests etc. on various blogs on our network (The Network Central, The SA Incubator, etc). Scheduling, managing and editing Guest Blog (and Expeditions blog during the field season) takes up much more of my time. Promoting the network posts everywhere is also a part of the job, as well as behind-the-scenes communications, planning for updates and improvements for the future, etc. I wish I had more time to write, and I am trying to figure out my own daily schedule so that happens.

Do you think that web is one big serendipity machine, from the scientific point of view? 

Ha! Of course. I experience it several times a day. Chance encounters with amazing people I never heard of before. Links to informative or thought-provoking articles on platforms I do not monitor daily. Ability I use as much as I can to connect two or more people who should know each other because they can do something together – including a scientific project – that is worth doing. Pairing a reporter and a source. Pointing a person to the advertisment for their dream job. Examples are endless.

You have an extensive, rich experience in the scientific blogging community. How do you think blogs have changed the scientific landscape? What is the way to activate scholars and scientists to start blogging and join the scientific blogging communities?  How to make them more interested? 

Blog is software. One can do many different things with it. One can discuss research details with peers, or educate new generations, or promote science to lay audiences, or actively push against various kinds of anti-science, pseudoscience or nonsense that originates from political, religious, or financial interests, or from sheer lack of information. Many science bloggers are really good at, through criticism, educating science reporters and teaching them how to do a better job – this is important as those professional reporters tend to have much bigger megaphones and tend to write under the banners of media organizations that have some respect and klout.

Science selects for good research, not for good communications skills and savvy. Thus, world of science contains a broad spectrum of people in regard to their ability or willingness to communicate to the public. Contrary to stereotypes, many scientists are excellent communicatiors – some are absolutely amazing at it – but some scientists are just not.

Both in regard to public communication, and in online activity, and in acceptance of various forms of Open Science (including Open Access publishing), there are scientists who quickly discover they are good at it and they just dive in and swim like fish. They should be encouraged (certainly not punished by their departments or colleagues for “wasting their time” or being “media whores”) and helped to reach wider audiences.

On the other end of the spectrum are people who are either resistant to change, or are truly not good at communication. We should help them by doing the communication for them. And we should try to inform them and persuade them to at least not hinder the progress of Open Science even if they are too set in their ways to try it themselves.

But most people are somewhere in the middle. Perhaps they don’t know enough about the way Open Science is taking over, and how to take advantage of it. Perhaps they are not very good communicators but can be taught and are willing to learn and practice and try to do it. This is really the target audience for us – people who need some help in navigating these new waters.

Do you have your favorite blogs and scientific magazines/blog networks in Australia, New Zealand to point out? Have you discovered any cool blogs that you can share with us? 

I should start with James Byrne, the lone Australian blogger on the Scientific American network. There are good reasons why I picked him and invited him to join – you’ll see for yourself, just read some of his posts.

One of the first science bloggers I ever discovered and read, and still admire greatly, is Tim Lambert of the Deltoid blog.

The SciBlogsNZ network is an amazing collective of excellent science bloggers – I seriously considered “stealing” some of them for my network, but decided that good relationships with the NZ science blogging community was more important 

COSMOS has recently launched a small but excellent blog network, led by probably my most favourite Australian blogger of all time – Becky Crew.

The skeptic blogging community is very strong in Australia and New Zealand, led (at least in my mind – I am not aware of the hierarchies in that group, really) by the amazing Kylie Sturgess, who recently published the first edition of The Young Australian Skeptics’ Skeptical Blog Anthology.

Last, but most certainly not least, is my old friend John Wilkins, with one of the best philosophy of science blogs ever:

Thank you Bora for taking your time to talk with me!

Banner image of the quail credited to Claire Fahrbach

With the tradition of the last year’s workshop Making Sense of Microposts or #MSM11, this year the big World Wide Web 2012 or WWW12 conference, is happening in April in Lyon, France. The official keynote speakers are announced,  and we can expect an interesting forum for researchers and practitioners in Web technologies to discuss and exchange positions on current and emergent Web topics.

This year, I’m again in the Programme Committee at one of the workshops: #MSM12 or Making Sense of Microposts, so I encourage you to submit your papers, findings, and demos – I’m looking forward to see you this spring in France.

Below is the rationale for the workshop.

With the appearance and expansion of Twitter, Facebook Like, Foursquare, and similar low-effort publishing services, the effort required to participate on the Web is getting lower and lower. Enormous quantities of small user input are being piped into the data streams of the Web, leading to a rate of growth which has never been witnessed before. We refer to such small user inputs as Microposts, these can range from ‘checkin’ at a location on a geo-social networking site – allowing users to inform their friends of their current location – through to a status update on a social networking platform. The production of such masses of data, combined with the disparate and heterogeneous nature of the topics which Microposts refer to, requires new techniques to glean knowledge from them and provide useful services and applications sitting atop the amalgamation of this data.

This workshop: “Making Sense of Microposts” (MSM), will cover the topics of: information extraction and leveraging of semantics from Microposts; making use of Microposts’ semantics; and social studies related to Microposts that could help build appealing new systems based on this type of data. The workshop has two main points of difference from existing Social Semantic Web workshops which partially treat Microposts: (a) the interdisciplinary nature and interest to bring together the Social Sciences and Semantic Web research; (b) the focus on Microposts’ usage in making appealing tools for Web users and showing how the Semantic Web makes a difference in those applications. One of the main goals of MSM is to bring together the researchers from various disciplines treating the question of Microposts from different angles. We are particularly interested in submissions describing theories from the Social Sciences related to the creation and potential usage of Microposts that could inspire the creation of data structures, ontologies and finally interfaces that make advanced use of Microposts. We also envisage submissions that describe the application of Semantic Web technologies, either in enabling the inference of new facts, or the gleaning and enriching of knowledge from collections of such data.”

I wrote an article at the Scientific American blog yesterday highlighting digital divides – or digital inequalities, if you prefer – from other perspectives, pointing out that these digital divides go far beyond pure infrastructure issues and need to become a key focus of engagement for profit and nonprofit organizations as they continue their missions to develop programs for social and digital inclusion.

Everyone’s talking about internet access: from European media to US media, stressing connectivity issues that merely compounding existing social inequalities as “new digital divides”, as if they are something new in the networked society. They are not.

According to the available measures, the selected indicators (such as gender, income, occupation, online experience, internet penetration, type of internet connection, etc.) are significantly related to the levels of (one’s country) per capita GDP, literacies, education, level of democratization, etc.

In Europe, Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Commission) conduct surveys and publish reports on Internet use (data I used for my research and other International reports and stats), whilst the EU’s Digital Agenda for Europe strategy make and initiate action plans for taking care of the information society in Europe.

As I wrote, the notion of being social on the Internet is constantly evolving since we are connected not only via computers but also via mobile phones or handheld devices. The web is getting more powerful and social: new messaging services emerge each month; streamed media is becoming real even for the non-technical consumer; Google reshapes its services like a child rearranging building blocks; new ideas in federated rather than centralized systems are being explored, and more. The frequent change in layouts, privacy settings and interaction tools indicate that online dynamics require users to possess new classes of knowledge and skills if they are to adapt to such major changes on Facebook, Google, Twitter and other places in order to navigate and socialize online.

Governments are struck by internet access and computers on the top level but don’t consider other factors important to decreasing already widening digital inequalities. But in the last 24 hrs I’ve received enormous amounts of feedback, with emails, comments, replies and reactions from the readers, twitterers (those following at @DanicaR), software engineers, education and e-learning specialists, media and policy makers, and comments from people in the Information-Communication Technologies. I’m grateful for your feedback as as I think I’ve hit a hot spot to which everyone in the Internet industry and policy sectors has to pay attention. It is a very interesting topic but also a complex one, and it will be a burning subject in the years to come as it influences all areas in the Information Networked Society.

Also take a look at a post from the Computer World. This is a very interesting reaction on my SciAm article by Simon Phipps who also gave some practical examples of digital inequalities/divides that illustrated how broad the categories at hand actually are. They include: teaching children and adults to use “transferrable concepts and skills using a variety of open source software; insisting that public data needs to be paid for because some companies might profit from it, with the result that only companies who can profit from it can use it; privacy controls which pretend that “privacy” is a synonym for “keeping secrets”, rather than “the ability to assert control over a social situation” as one researcher insightfully observes”, etc.

Governments worldwide must create more efficient strategies and programs to overcome such inequalities and not just provide techno-infrastructure. They can do this by creating, developing and fostering knowledge societies in order to decrease the existing divides, and also by cultivating communities of practice and emphasizing over and over that learning (formal, non formal, life-long) is social and by engaging and interacting on social networks and deploying social media services. Of course, in the future we need to get more concrete on those skills online, as well as the behaviours through which they are expressed. We also need to create strategies and implementation plans for how they can be cultivated and developed. I think here foremost of the communication skills, literacy, participatory, critical skills, that are enabling us to socialize, network, learn, and collaborate.

Feel free to comment on the types of digital divide and inequalities you have noticed or experienced lately. Your observations and thoughts are welcomed – this is going much further than I expected!

Finally, news of my own progress. A book chapter I wrote should be published next year I hope. Meanwhile, my dissertation has entered the final phase of qualitative research and writing up. Now more than ever I am ready for new engagements and collaborations, projects and initiatives in the upcoming year – 2012. Feel free to email me if you are interested in working/collaborating with me – or indeed if your company needs me! Wishing you the very best for the holidays!

Photo credits: mimax