Archive for April, 2005
I Miss You, Blogs! And a Few Thanks.
And I really do. A few minutes ago, I took some time to check all my favourite blogs that I hadn’t been able to in the last two weeks. Loads of new and interesting posts to read … and I still can’t stop envying Michael for his new Carniola, which is very pleasant for the eyes and entertaining for the mind. I hope some day I find time to give my Con Brio some of Carniola looks;).
Otherwise, I am really happy at the moment. My experiment turned out to be as planned, we did follow the timetable (more or less) and conduct exactly 100 qualitative interviews plus three times five web surveys. Now, the big part is yet to come, but so far so really happy.
My researchers/students who had helped me working on it, were really good at their job and all I can say is a big Thank you! to all of them. Without them, my experiment wouldn’t have worked out just quite as it did. So, Andreja, Andreja, Janja, Ursa, Mojca, Eva, Teja, Jure, Miha and Andraz - I am most happy to have worked with you (well, probably they wouldn’t have said the same, cos I was really hardly bearable on times). But I hope it was an enjoyable experience for all of us in the end.
And I must not forget my supervisor Vasja Vehovar, who also supported me with his ideas at the right moments and gave me useful advises and tips just when I needed them.
And then there are some key people, who also made everything possible for me: Matthai (Matej), Gandalfar (Jure), Skrat (Gasper), Sergio (Sergej), Racer_D (Dusan) and Primoz. They offered me much of technical and mental (!) support.
And last but not least, a big Thank you! to all Slo-Tech users, who did participate in qualitative and quantitative part of the research. They all were extraordinary collaborative and I was amazed at their willingness to participate.
So, this was just a beginning of a long journey, but precisely for this very pleasant start I know it will be a nice one.
By Nana | April 27, 2005 | Topics: Blogging | No Comments »
A Snapshot of a Dream
By | April 26, 2005 | Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Been working all days …
… yeh I know. Lousy excuse for not blogging. But it’s so much true these days. If I ever had used ‘I am oh so busy’ excuse for not blogging before, now it’s for real. I am working nites, I never did before. I lack time so much that I even skip my morning habit of reading all my favorite blogs. I took a moment today tho to discover that Michael changed Carniola’s looks - wow, Michael! Anyway, I am busy with something extremely pleasant for a change: my PhD. The ‘mixed-method experiment’ is in a full run and I can’t wait to discover what comes out of it. I am keeping the details for myself so far. I am gonna be presenting the preliminary results at Cambridge conference in July.
Things that also occupy my mind lately:
-what the heck is wrong with my laptop (ventilator on all the time);
-when am gonna be playing with my cute nephews again, I am starting to miss them;
-my friend is getting married this Saturday (my first friend getting married, mind I found out three days ago, cos my mum didn’t tell me about her snail mail invitation), so what should I buy as a wedding present;
-(no,I am not worried what am gonna be wearing, tho);
-been busy finding a flatshare for my London summer stay, quite successfully I dare say;
-trying to prepare my brain to the idea of writing up my Oxford paper, deadline approaching fast;
-daydreaming about various things;
-being worried about one specific thing.
Gnite;))
By Nana | April 18, 2005 | Topics: Conferences, General, PhD | No Comments »
When the Blogger Blogs, Can the Employer Intervene?
(Warning: LONG POST, for all those who can’t logon to The New York Times)
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
The New York Times
There are about 10 million blogs out there, give or take, including one belonging to Niall Kennedy, an employee at Technorati, a small San Francisco-based company that, yes, tracks blogs.
Like many employees at many companies, Mr. Kennedy has opinions, even when he is not working. One evening last month, he channeled one of those off-duty opinions into a satiric bit of artwork - an appropriation of a “loose lips sink ships” World War II-era propaganda poster altered to provide a harsh comment on the growing fears among corporations over the blogging activities of their employees. He then posted it on his personal Web log.
But in a paradoxical turn, Mr. Kennedy’s employer, having received some complaints about the artwork, stepped in and asked him to reconsider the posting and Mr. Kennedy complied, taking the image down.
“The past day has been a huge wake-up call,” Mr. Kennedy wrote soon afterward. “I see now that the voice of a company is not limited to top-level executives, vice presidents and public relations officers.”
As the practice of blogging has spread, employees like Mr. Kennedy are coming to the realization that corporations, which spend millions of dollars protecting their brands, are under no particular obligation to tolerate threats, real or perceived, from the activities of people who become identified with those brands, even if it is on their personal Web sites.
They are also learning that the law offers no special protections for blogging - certainly no more than for any other off-duty activity.
As Annalee Newitz, a policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group in Washington, put it, “What we found is there really is quite a bit of diversity in how employers are responding to blogging.”
A rising tide of employees have recently been reprimanded or let go for running afoul of their employers’ taste or temperament on personal blogs, including a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines who learned the hard way that the carrier frowns on cheeky photos while in uniform and a Google employee who mused on the company’s financial condition and was fired.
Some interpreted these actions as meaning that even in their living rooms, even in their private basement computer caves, employees are required to be at least a little bit worried about losing their jobs if they write or post the wrong thing on their personal Web logs.
“I would have expected that some of the louder, more strident voices on the Internet would have risen up in a frenzy over this,” said Stowe Boyd, the president of Corante, a daily online news digest on the technology sector. “But that didn’t happen.”
In Mr. Boyd’s opinion, everything about what Mr. Kennedy did was protected speech. The use of trademarks was fair use in a satirical work, Mr. Boyd said, and it seemed unlikely that the company would be somehow liable for the off-duty actions of an employee, as Technorati executives argued. It was, in Mr. Boyd’s eyes, an indication that corporate interests were eclipsing individual rights.
“I don’t know what else to say,” he declared. “I’m astonished.”
But Ms. Newitz and others have cautioned that employees must be careful not to confuse freedom of speech with a freedom from consequences that might follow from what they say. Indeed, the vast majority of states are considered “at will” states - meaning that employees can quit, and employers can fire them, at will - without evident reason (barring statutory exceptions like race or religion, where discrimination would have to be proved).
“There really are no laws that protect you,” Ms. Newitz said.
Martin H. Malin, a professor of law and director of the Institute for Law and the Workplace at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, said there were only a few exceptions.
“It depends on what the blog is,” he said, “what the content is, and whether there’s any contractual protection for the employee.”
Those who work for the United States Postal Service, for instance, or a local sanitation department may have some special blogging privileges. That is because, depending on the circumstances, the online speech of public employees can be considered “of public concern,” and enjoys a measure of protection, Professor Malin explained.
Employees protected under some union contracts may also be shielded from summary dismissal for off-duty activities, at least without some sort of arbitration. “Lifestyle law” trends of the late 1980’s and early 90’s - sometimes driven by tobacco and alcohol lobbies - created state laws that protected employees from being fired for engaging in legal, off-duty activities, though no one is likely to be fired simply for blogging, but rather for violating some policy or practice in a blog.
And bloggers who are neither supervisors nor managers and who can demonstrate that they are communicating with other workers about “wages, hours or working conditions” may warrant some protection under the National Labor Relations Act, Professor Malin said - even in nonunion enterprises.
None of this, of course, answers the question of where the status of employee ends and that of private citizen begins.
Some companies, like Sun Microsystems, have wrapped both arms around blogging. Sun provides space for employees to blog (blogs.sun.com), and while their darker impulses are presumably kept at bay by the arrangement, there are hundreds of freewheeling and largely unmonitored diaries supported by the company.
Microsoft, too, has benefited from the organic growth of online journaling by celebrity geeks now in its employ, like Robert Scoble, whose frank and uncensored musings about the company have developed a loyal following and given Microsoft some street credibility.
But other companies are seeing a need for formalized blogging policies.
Mark Jen, who was fired from Google in January after just two weeks, having made some ill-advised comments about the company on his blog (Google would not comment on Mr. Jen’s dismissal, but confirmed that he no longer works for it), is now busy helping to draft a blogging policy for his new employer, Plaxo, an electronic address book updating service in Mountain View, Calif.
“It was a very quick education for me at Google,” Mr. Jen said. “I learned very quickly the complexities of a corporate environment.”
With Plaxo’s blessing, Mr. Jen is soliciting public comment on the new blogging policy at blog.plaxoed.com.
Most of the points are the kinds of common-sense items that employees would do well to remember, particularly if they plan on identifying themselves as employees in their blogs, or discussing office matters online: don’t post material that is obscene, defamatory, profane or libelous, and make sure that you indicate that the opinions expressed are your own.
The policy also encourages employee bloggers to use their real names, rather than attempting anonymity or writing under a pseudonym.
Bad idea, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Two weeks ago, the group published a tutorial on “how to blog safely,” which included tips on avoiding getting fired. Chief among its recommendations: Blog anonymously.
“Basically, we just want to caution people about how easy it is to find them online,” Ms. Newitz said, “and that they are not just talking to their friends on their blogs. They’re talking to everyone.”
But does that means that Mr. Kennedy, a short-timer, a product manager and by no means an executive at Technorati, carries the burden of representing the company into his personal blog?
Technorati’s vice president for engineering, Adam Hertz, responded: “It would be antithetical to our corporate values to force Niall to do anything in his blog. It’s his blog.”
Yet with the spread of the Internet and of blogging, Mr. Hertz said, it would be foolish for companies to not spend some time discussing the art of public communications with their employees, and even train and prepare lower-level staff for these kinds of public relations situations.
That said, Mr. Hertz stressed that the company had no interest in formalizing any complicated policies regarding an employee’s activities outside the office.
“I had a high school teacher,” he recalled, “who used to say ‘I have only two rules: Don’t roller-skate in the hallway and don’t be a damn fool.’ We really value a company where people can think for themselves.”
By Nana | April 18, 2005 | Topics: Blogging | No Comments »
After a Looooooong Time ….
… I went on my morning run again. After three whole months! I feel great, at my biggest surprise am still in a quite good condition. I felt no pain, which means my recovery from the surgery was perfect;)) Yoohoooo! Can’t wait I’ll go running again tomorrow (Gregor suggested that I should go again in one hours time if I am so enthusiastic about it).
By | April 13, 2005 | Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else)
Partial answer to the questions in our debate can be found here.
Thanks, Jure;))
By Nana | April 9, 2005 | Topics: Blogging | No Comments »
Blogging and Keeping Our Jobs
I have been wanting to write this for quite a while now. I always said I would do it later. So now! Recently (and also not that recently) I read quite a few stories about people who lost their jobs for blogging (e.g. a former Google employee Mark Jen, web designer Heather Armstrong). So, First Amendment only restricts governmental control of speech, but companies are free to fire any employee who writes ‘unpleasant’ stuff by their standards. Tho this is only applicable to bloggers who blog under their real name. So, the solution seems pretty simple. If we want to be bitching our employer, we will just write a blog under some silly nick. But truly, it is not that simple at all. It is only a matter of hour, before someone who really wants to find out who the blogger is gets to us. As blogging appears to be spreading around like a virus, companies should consider writing up guidelines for possible blogging by employees. Most companies already have the policy for internet usage so they should include the blogging bit as well. But sure, we alone have to be very conscious of any unpleasant consequences our blogging might have.
So, I am asking myself how my blog can get me in trouble with regard to my job. Hm, so far, I didn’t write anything bad about people from my work. But where are the limits? Would I at all be aware of it, if I did it? What if I wrote just some harmless thoughts and someone would feel offended?
I’d like to hear your opinion. Have you got similar concerns?
By Nana | April 3, 2005 | Topics: Blogging | No Comments »
Saturday morning
I just wrote a post and accidentaly deleted it. Hm, looks like it wasn’t meant to be read. Better, it was not a pleasant one really. Me complaining over having spent last nite at emergency doctor for almost 6 hours (nothing wrong with me - at that time, but my mum, who was supposed to go home for a weekend from a hospital). Now I have a running nose, sore throat, slight temperature … nothing compared to what she has to go thru but still. I was healthy when I got there, now I am tired, exhausted and angry, cos she isn’t any better …
I slept with a sleeping mask almost for the whole nite … usually I manage to lose it quite quickly … Bellow, me and Raph, being so eager to trying our sleeping masks for the first time that we spent the whole evening like this —->
By Nana | April 2, 2005 | Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
More of GOR
The third presentation on this session addressed the future of blogging. Author (Rasco Perschke) introduced a new technique for analysing blogs, called COM (communication-oriented modelling). We can use it for describing a large-scale communication networks, focusing on “message to message” relations, or for social variability and different levels of connectability. COM theory is a social theory, concentrating on messages and communication operations (inception and reception). Authors made a study of linking, since links are the central elements of weblog posting. They looked at how links were integrated into blogs entries. The last presentation I listened to in this session was a very interesting Jan Schmidt’s presentation on Blogging as social action. Firstly, he introduced various styles of blogging: private journals, expert communication, corporate communication and political communication. Then he introduced how a blogging episode is framed by various structural elements, such as codes, rules and relations. Those interested can find the whole stuff here.
After lunchtime I went to listen to session Digital Divide & Digital Inequality, which included three presentation (one of them was Vesna’s Advanced Measuring of Digital Divide). But in was particularly intrigued by the one on Non users of internet, presented by Maren Hartmann. She conceptualised the internet non-user as a research category. They don’t use internet due to lack of trust, luck of abilities, they either have no need or desire. To find out more about non-users, please read this report from Pew Internet.
The last three sessions I listened to on Tuesday were session on Website evaluation, session on Interaction Processes in Online Groups and last one Response rates in Online Surveys. The most impressive presentations: Uwe Matzat on Theory of relational signals in online groups and Adam Joinson (who also chaired the blogger session) with Personalisation, authentication and self-disclosure in self-administered web surveys. Well, this one was really something. That nice British accent, a cup of coffee and very relaxed appearance made it the winner of the conference for me;)). Tho I must not forget Lars with his progress indicators and Katja’s meta-analysis. I was really tired by the end of the day so I made very little or no notes at all. But after the first day, I was very happy with the conference. A delicious conference dinner was a nice closure to it.
To be continued …
By Nana | April 1, 2005 | Topics: Conferences, Les Voyages | No Comments »