anthroblogia

Just a quick one to post a scanned copy of an article I had published in Off the Edge last month - it's about blogs in Malaysia and the future of blogs in general, hope you enjoy it - click here for a pdf.

As promised, here is some more analysis of the survey. In this post, I'm going to compare responses to a series of statements that were asked to both bloggers and non-bloggers about their opinions on blogs in general. The idea behind this set of statements was to see whether there was some sort of consensus amongst bloggers and readers about what a blog should be like - i.e. is there an ideal-type blog that the members of the blogosphere believes should be a model to follow? There were some questions on more objective matters (e.g. photos or not, comments or not), and some more subjective matters (e.g. whether a blogger should be honest or not).

For me, often the most interesting questions are usually those that ask people to rate their level of agreement with certain statements (it's called using a Likert scale normally); social science is never an accurate science, and reflecting people's range of thoughts and practices accurately based on a structured questionnaire (i.e. with choices of answers) is very difficult, but this way does give one way of reflecting the many shades of gray that make up human behaviour.

You can see the details of the responses by clicking on the thumbnails below
but what I'll do here is compare them using area charts to get a feel for the trends. The charts compare the responses by Bloggers (in pink; n = 356) and Non-Bloggers (in green; n = 197). If you see more on the right side, it means more agreed with the statement, and disagreements show up on the left; a peak in the middle means more were 'Neutral'. Where there is more of a difference in their attitudes, you can see the colour stand out. You should also be aware that these graphs are not always directly comparable - because the scale on the y-axis changes sometimes.

Functional features
These compare the more 'functional features' that bloggers and non-bloggers prefer.


The clearest preference is for comments - overall just over 80% of bloggers and non-bloggers think that blogs should have a comments function; compared to the chat-box, you can see that there is a lot less interest as to whether or not there is a chat-box on a blog.


There's a general preference for photos, but many are Neutral, and about one-fifth think they are not a necessity. The Non-Bloggers tend to think this is more important.

Continue reading "The 'ideal type' blog?"

I’ve been meaning to do this for more than a week now, but have been pretty busy (some previous thoughts here).

The KL Bar Council’s Information Technology Committee has planned a series of forums on IT related issues, and this was the first one on “Blogging and Defamation”. It started on time (unusually) and the panellists were three long-standing bloggers – Nizam Bashir, Foong Cheng Loong and Jeff Ooi.

The Chair of the Committee stareted by explaining that defamation was

‘a statement calculated to injure another person or reduce willingness of others to associate with said person’

There is also civil and criminal defamation – which may be based on the same definition, but the criminal one can land you in jail for two years. He pointed out that there is NO special protection for bloggers, and even criticising someone’s char kuey teow in Jalan Alor can be considered defamatory. By the way – ‘slander’ is oral, and ‘defamation’ is written – I think they have the same potential liabilities though.

Nizam Bashir (sorry no photo) gave a detailed presentation on the legal history and other facts about defamation and blogging. He pointed out the constitutional ‘right to freedom of speech and expression’, but there are provisos that limit this right in relation to security, contempt of court, ‘morality’ [not sure what this was exactly], defamation, incitement of an offence; and also relating to (Bumiputra, I suppose) privileges, religion, and the rulers.

Defences that can be used are:
• Truth: (if it’s the truth it’s not defamation, I suppose)
• ‘Legal, social or moral duty’ to say something to a particular person (e.g. a teacher telling a parent their child is no good at school). As relates to blogs, you could have a password protected post for particular person
• Expressing an opinion: the facts must be reasonably accurate and in the public interest – based on the concept of “fair comment”

He said that the key issue was where to place the boundaries to free speech. He said that Malaysians should be able to speak about some of the topics placed ‘off-limits’ - “we are made of sterner stuff”. He also said that one of the consequences of the recent legal actions initiated against bloggers was a chilling effect on the freedom of speech; more people may want to stay anonymous - which affects the credibility of blogs; and overall more problems than solutions is the general result.


Continue reading "Blogging and Defamation – Part II"

Unfortunately, it's a Japanese plant so I can't understand what it says, but it certainly challenges the boundaries of blogging!

Check it out here.

This is for real, by the way - I read about it in BBC:

A potted plant at a cafe near Tokyo, Japan is entertaining customers by writing a regular blog about its feelings.

It is the work of a university engineer who has been studying how to communicate with plants.

He devised a sensor which he attached to the plant named "Midori-san" that measures bio-electric signals. These are converted into data by a computer next the plant and then translated into Japanese in the form of a blog.

The plant's latest entry reads: "It was cloudy today. It was a cold day." (BBC)

Just a rapid one as I’m pretty stressed out and well behind on my work, argh!

My new gardening blog has been online for about ten days now, and the first task is to make it visible to other blogs and bloggers. A blog with no readers is really no different from a diary stuck under the bed.

So, results so far: I submitted the site to Google, and the sitemap as well, so if I search for the url, it comes up


That took about four days to happen.

I have submitted the blog to various directories, including: Blotanical (which is a nice social network for gardeners, some very impressive gardeners in there!); Blog Explosion (they have a useful ping function – they took about 5-6 days to approve the blog); and Garden Blog Directory (which is a pretty basic directory).

So, today I tried to see if there are any incoming links to my blog. First I tried the classic ‘link: your.url.com’


That got nothing. So I checked out the more advanced Google Webmaster tools


which gave the same result… It says i'm in the index, but not the sitemap. I'll give it a bit more time - for example, I know that there's at least one link in from this blog. I suppose Google still needs to do more indexing of other webistes, and all that


I’ll be giving updates on how it proceeds.

In the last year, I’ve noticed that more and more bloggers put chat boxes on their blogs. For me, it’s a bit inconvenient because I may miss some of the ‘conversation’ that occurs around the post – i.e. if there are only comments, all responses to the post are visible under the post. This is one of the great things about blogs (from a research point of view) because I get to see everything that readers thought important enough to say in response to the post; well, almost everything, because bloggers may also respond by doing their own post – but often you can ‘hear’ about that in the comments too.

But anyway, I can’t expect bloggers to act in the way I want just to make my research easier, so I have been asking around a bit as to why people have chatboxes. Some bloggers have told me that they are more likely to use the chat box for casual ‘hellos’, or to say something that is not relevant to the post. Others have said that basically it’s just easier to use the chatbox as opposed to the comments (less windows to open, etc.)

Today, I saw something new – Annaling responded to comments in her chatbox in a new post (original post here, and the chatbox comments recorded on the 9/9/08).

These were the chatbox comments

And this was the post in response


I’ve also seen a chatbox used as a means of advertisement, by Race Against Time


As far as advertisements go, using a chatbox has to be less advantageous – because the time it is visible is pretty uncontrollable… but one can imagine having a system whereby it comes up after every ten chats or something. It could benefit from the transitory environment by appearing more spontaneous, and therefore more ‘real’.

I haven’t put one on my site yet, mainly because I want to keep a track of any comments easily, but it may also be because I’m not really an IM type of person – I’ve never really got into using IM much, as I prefer being able to choose when to answer emails/comments rather than having to respond to messages that arrive at any time.

Anyway - what do you think? Chatbox or not? Why ah?