The Desert of My Dreams

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to speak at a private two-day conference (entitled the Conference on Blogs and Democracy) sponsored by the U.S. State Department. I am honored to have been selected and am very grateful for getting the opportunity to hear some of the most influential people in this area talk about online communities and blogs.

During my talk, I mostly spoke about my thesis, specifically my observations of the Kuwait Blogs community. As part of my participation in the conference, I was asked to draft my reflections about the conference. Since others may benefit from these thoughts (and may want to engage in a discussion), I decided to post these thoughts publicly. Below you’ll find a few themes from the conference that I’d like to comment on:

• The Importance of Blogs in the Arab World – Even though blogging in the Arab world is a fairly new/contained phenomenon, it is still an important phenomenon to study and observe because it sheds a lot of light about what is happening in Arab societies on a daily basis. The Arabs who are adopting blogs (and del.icio.us, flickr, etc) may not represent the larger Arab societies (mere observation, no real data about this yet). They tend to be the early adopters (more technically astute and of the financial/social/educational elite). Putting those characteristics aside, we can still get a general pulse of what is happening on the ground (unlike mainstream Arab media which is heavily censored in some nations). CNN has recently used videos and experiences posted by Lebanese bloggers in their reports about the current crisis in Lebanon [Wired article] [another related article]. Moreover, in some nations, these blogs are helping people become more organized in regards to civic issues [similar to Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs]. This article credits the Kuwait bloggers with organizing a street protest for election reforms. From a sociological perspective, I think these blogs are documenting (and perhaps helping expand) the slow changes that are occurring in Arab culture.
• Social network analysis – SNA was mentioned several times as a promising methodology for understanding blog network topologies and studying impact of initiatives on communities. In some respects, such assumptions are true. However, SNA is rather quantitative in nature and fairly difficult to do well without extensive experience and training (there’s a pretty good reason why the most influential researchers in this field tend to be physicists, statisticians, and mathematicians).
• Network visualizations/data gathering – On a related note, several people were curious about how I created my blog network visualizations. I used a free open-source tool called GUESS. There are a number of other free tools available, Pajek being the most famous of those. Others were also interested in how I collected my data. For the comments network that I presented at the conference, I manually collected this data, meaning that I visited every blog in my dataset (and during the time frame that I specified) and recorded who left a comment on each blog post. Gathering data in this manner is extremely time consuming and not something I would recommend for practical purposes. Nonetheless, this same sort of data can be gathered automatically for links (who is linking to which blogs) by using the Technorati API.
• Blogs as knowledge management – Towards the end of the conference, the idea of using blogs as knowledge management systems was brought up and debated. Blogs can be a great tool for knowledge management mostly for their conversational tone. On the other hand, given the large amounts of text involved, blogs may not be the best tool when it comes to findability (in a body of conversational text, what is the most important and to whom?). The cultural issues surrounding the implementation of blogs in an organization are really no different than those associated with any other knowledge management system. Those issues of trust, incentives, buy-in, etc. are complicated and would require another conference with experts in the knowledge management domain to completely dissect and interpret.