Blogademia

2009-10-27T23:57:00.002Z

The Hong Kong Post

In a week I will be attending the 1st International CIKM Workshop on Topic-Sentiment Analysis for Mass Opinion Measurement ... or TSA for short. It's been put together by some top names in the area, and there are some very interesting looking papers on the program ... not least of which is my paper of course: Scary Films Good, Scary Flights Bad: Topic driven feature selection for classification of sentiment.

I shall endeavour to write up anything interesting that I see/hear/learn/discuss once we get back (and we shall be reporting on the travel/culinary side over at Exit Music). It's getting quite late to register, so if this is the first you've heard of TSA then I apologise for not mentioning it sooner. If you'll be going, however, then I'll see you there!

2009-04-27T05:27:00.000+01:00

2009, The Story So Far

Did I mention that the paper Alastair, Jon and I recently wrote was accepted for this years ICWSM conference? No? Well it was. I'm hoping to make it over but there are a few things to work out here first. Either way the esteemed Dr Gill will be presenting on our behalf. It's looking like a pretty interesting conference, and the reviewers certainly showed great interest in our work.

Ok, so I maybe didn't mention that, but surely I told you about the other work that is happening around the world with my fellow blogademics? Did I not? I could have sworn that I told you about the work up in Calgary looking at non-literal language (for example sarcasm and hyperbole) in blogs; and the studies being conducted in personality classification in Chicago following the work on our 2007 paper with our large dataset. There are a few posters and papers in the offing and I'll definitely tell you more as things develop.

I certainly know I haven't told you anything about what I've been doing recently at work. I too am following up all my previous work on socio-biographic classification of text. We've been undergoing a program of redevelopment on some of our language processing software, and I'm very much enjoying being at the heart of it. Things are shaping up nicely.

2008-11-06T03:29:00.001Z

O Canada (not literally)

I am fully aware that posting has been thin on the ground in recent (and not so recent) times. Well I'm here to bring you the first in a series of posts to discuss the latest developments.

That's right, there are actual developments.

Increasingly I have come to realise that I possess some pretty unique data, and if I'm not working on it then it's a shame to let it go to waste. My first venture into new collaborative thinking came about when Alastair (Dr Gill to you) provided me with a data sharing opportunity.

And so it comes to be that my corpus is currently with some friendly researchers at the University of Calgary. Juanita Whalen, having recently looked into email with Alastair, is currently exploring the use of non-literal language in personal blogs. I've only seen some cursory findings but they are very interesting and seem to correspond with a few things I've previously found in the same data.

Watch this space for more details ... I promise there will be more details.

2008-05-07T01:10:00.004+01:00

Coming To An Academic Bookstore Near You . . . In 2009/10

Moving from academia to industry has meant a number of changes, not least of which is that there are fewer opportunities to publish research. (Did you think I was going to say something about my lack of blogging here on Blogademia? Well, I will admit that this did cross my mind, but this is a kind of publishing so I felt it was adequately covered.)

I always meant to carry on with my blog studies, because I'm still very interested in the area, but the most I've been able to do recently is review for various conferences (I hope some of you made it to ICWSM this year) and journals. However, by the power of "it's not what you know but who knows about what you know" this activity brought me an offer I found hard to resist.

One of the editors that I've reviewed for is putting together a collection of new works to publish as a book. Since it's in the area of pragmatics and computer-mediated communication, and they know this is exactly what I do, I was asked to consider putting in a proposal for a chapter. It's one thing to find an opportunity like this, but it's quite another be directly invited. Both honoured and excited at the possibility, I accepted. Writing a chapter about the language of weblogs (now that sounds good ... I might have a title there :) ) should be right up my street, and would be a great way to immerse myself back in my role as a blogademic.

This was a little while ago, but I just got the decision email the other day. Now it's not the case that I wouldn't be blogging this if the answer had been "thanks but no thanks", but I think you can probably guess what that decision was. And so you find yourselves with the very exciting possibility that you will be able to go to a book store and actually buy a little piece of my wisdom. I'm so excited for you :)

2007-12-14T23:56:00.000Z

ICWSM 08 - Reviewing

Blogademia ... now that's a name I've not heard in a long, long time. I'm always torn between posting something here to keep it going, and wanting only to post stuff worthy of posting. With the change of jobs, I've been kept nicely busy in recent times, and so my blog work has fallen by the wayside. Not my interest ... oh no ... I'm still really into social media, I'm still a sociolinguist, and I will get to pursue sentiment analysis in time. I'm just not sure when I'll get to write again. I've a few opportunities coming up - my grip on my data finally loosening - as both Jon and Alastair are beginning to work with people interested in continuing our group's interest in the area.

For my own part, I've mostly been playing the part of reviewer in recent times. It's quite an honour to be asked to review on the topics and for the specific publications I've been asked to do. I do have a very niche area of expertise, which I guess makes me a go to guy for such things. Along with all the individual papers though, I'm also on the committee for the international conference on weblogs and social media to be held in Seattle next year. Keen blogademics will know that I attended last year along with Sam Gosling. It seems our work of a more psychological bent has helped shape the direction of this years conference, and there has been a significant increase in submissions in this area.

This is two edged blade of course. It is great to see more people doing work in this area, slowly building the profile of psycho/sociological work in online environments. It will be fascinating to read these papers to see what new directions people are moving in. However, the big disappointment is that I probably won't be going this year. I know, I know, this is saddening news but just because there will be no Nowson does not mean the rest of you shouldn't go - trust me when I say this one is going to be good!!

2007-09-07T09:09:00.000+01:00

Time For Another Change

I though it was high time I shared my news with you, and you might want to sit down for this. Are you ready? I'm leaving academia.

What do you mean you weren't ready? I gave you ample bracing time.

Anyway, it's not as bad as it sounds. Basically my life at Macquarie has run its course, and it was obvious a while back that it was time to move. And move I am. And while I am going to be leaving academia my recent work has not been concerned with blogs or personality anyway. And as you can tell from the updatedness of this blog in recent times, it's not like there's been a great deal to report. With the work I've been doing, there's just been no time. It's something that if you don't experience as a post-doc, you're very lucky.

But all that will change I promise. While I can't say exactly what I'm actually going to be doing in my new role (anyone that's worked in/with industry will be familiar with the restrictions of an NDA) I can tell you that it is much - MUCH - closer to my own research interests. It should also give me more of an opportunity to get back in the game by pursuing some of my own work. And I'm still enjoying (and available for) reviewing, so have plenty of motivation for keeping the Nowson Blogademia names out there. In fact, I have a number of ideas for collaboration that I might now get a chance to pursue ...

2007-08-01T11:52:00.000+01:00

An Interesting Corpus

MySpace removes 29,000 accounts of sex offenders. Rearrange those words in countless ways and you have the myriad headlines that surfaced across the internet last week. I don't pretend to know all the details, and I'm certainly not going to get into any discussions of 2nd chances or something like that. No, I come at this story from purely objective academic interest.

There is increasing interest in detecting undesirables on the internet. I've seen adverts here, in the UK and the US which are essentially making it clear that internet chat rooms, for example, are monitored. You've all seen the adverts, with adults speaking with a kids voice. It IS a dangerous world out there, and people do need to be careful online.

It seems that to take a stand and be seen to be doing something, MySpace deleted profiles of known sex offenders. Whether or not they knew about these because people used their real names, had suspicious interests or some other cunning plan, is not clear. What they have done by doing this, however, is create a ready made corpus of profiles of undesirables. This is exactly the kind of data that academics would love to get their hands on. If you want to be able to detect something, you need to have concrete examples of it. But it is hard to go out yourself and find such data. I doubt that this "corpus" will ever become publicly available but they have it there, ready to go. Imagine what you could do with this.

And imagine you will have to, because I'm not giving you any of my ideas.

2007-07-07T04:42:00.000+01:00

No Way?! A Post!

When you reach the half way point of the year, and you still have posts from last year, you know you've been slack. To all those people who have been reading, if nothing else I need to let you know that this blog is not dead. Blogademia is not just another statistic, though it has been on hiatus. I've had to focus all my efforts on my work on text summarisation - I've been coding my touche off making all sorts of web based tools.

But that's not to say things haven't been happening quietly in the background. So I thought I'd just chuck a few things out there, along with the requisite promise to be back soon to write more.
First up, belated congratulations to my esteemed colleague Dr Alastair Gill, who has taken up his new position at Northwestern University in Chicago.
We're currently working on a revision of our journal submission. The reviews we got back were very encouraging and positive, and we look forward to doing them justice.
Alastair will be presenting a poster summarising this paper at next week's 17th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse to be held in Glasgow.
I've been doing a number of reviewing spots recently: for JCMC; for the persistent conversation track at Hawaii International Conference on System Science; and for the Texas Linguistics Society for which I have been invited to be on the program committee.
So as you can see my finger is very much still on the pulse, I'm still in the game. I just need to do it here more often.

2007-04-11T09:20:00.000+01:00

University of Texas at Austin

And so we turn to the second leg of my trip. It may not have been worth flying halfway round the world just for the blog conference, so when Sam Gosling invited me to visit UT Austin I jumped at the chance. He told me before I left for the US that there were a good few people interested in meeting with me while I was there. This was to be my first real chance to talk to psychologists, so I was flattered that anyone was interested.

What Sam failed to convey is that I would barely have a minute to myself while in Austin. When I actually saw my schedule I was stunned. This is one of the big changes in no longer being a wandering doctoral student but becoming a touring postdoctoral researcher: you have to bear in mind that people are coming to see you; you are an expert in your field; people will have questions and you will be able to confidently answer them. All very exciting stuff.

So over the course of my short stay I met with a lot of very interesting people (from linguistics and computer science as well as psychology) and had some really good discussions. Many of the ideas that came up will fuel my future thinking, as well as provide fodder to post about here. I established that the Edinburgh connection (my alma mater is a world leader in the computational linguistics field) is well represented in Austin. I also met people who knew (or knew of) both Jon and Robert, so I was given the opportunity to discuss areas beyond the sociolinguistics of blogs.

Not that I could ever get tired of talking about my work. It really is an interesting area to study, and though I know I would say that, I'm clearly not the only one who thinks so. Attendance for my talk was really good and - even if I do say so myself - I was on particularly fine form. Needless to say, it went over very well.

Since I've been back, I've been in contact with and have been contacted by a number of Austinians. I am, as ever, more than happy to talk about anything relating to my work or indeed personality, language or blogs more generally. I am also more than happy with the possibilities for the future that have opened up as a result of my visit. I was very fortunate to meet good people from a wide range of backgrounds. Of particular benefit was the flight from Austin to LA with Jamie Pennebaker. This trip has left me with a lot to think about. I'm looking forward to the directions my work could go in and the collaboration that my trip could bring. Between this and the conference, it was well worth flying halfway round the world.

2007-04-05T13:18:00.000+01:00

ICWSM In Full
(International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media)

Following my return from my US trip, I felt it really only fair to give a more in depth account of my trip. I shall start here by giving more details on the conference. I may name names and I may say some negative things, though not necessarily relating the two. You 'll just have to wait and see.

Firstly, the positive. It was good to catch up with people who I met at last years AAAI Symposium. Obviously the organisers, Nicolas Nicolov, Natalie Glance and that Matt Hurst fellow. There were also a few attendees who I got to see again, including Richard Tong and Diego Reforgiato. There were also a number of other interesting people there, particularly the representatives of OpinMind and TEXTMAP. There were a broad range of talks, and helpfully they were grouped into sessions this year. Of most interest to me was the plethora of work on sentiment analysis. People are still taking very general approaches to this, and despite the impressiveness, there is considerable room for refinement and improvement. It was handy having the venue in the hotel, but jet lag prevented me from seeing much of Boulder.

And now, the negatives, many of which were totally out of the control of the organisers, so I hope they don't take too much of this to heart. It didn't feel like there was as much work of a sociological bent this time around, despite there being a loose track in which Sam Gosling and I both fell. Following this, it was a shame not to see people like Shlomo Argamon there again. It is also true to say that there were some pretty poor presentations. Apart from an interesting study confirming a belief I have always held that you should never just read your slides, many were just painful to listen to. I understand that a lot of people don't have the confidence for public speaking, but I wish there was some way I could help. Yes, talking to a room full of people is hard, but what each speaker needs to bear in mind is that for that moment, they have a room full of people dedicated to listening to them, the expert in the field. Every speaker is an expert in what they are about to say. I believe if more people realised that, there would be more life in their oration and the overall standards of talks would be considerably higher. But that's just me, I evaluate style and delivery as much, if not more, than content.

Despite the apparent lacking in attendees and confidence, one thing that was missing from the conference itself was room for discussion. AAAI had some good panel sessions and slots just for talking as a whole group. These parts were very interesting - they are an opportunity to go beyond any specific piece of research. Probably due to the volume of interest in this conference, there was no time for anything but talks. I think next time at least one good long panel session, and more time for general discussion would be really good. From conversations with the organisers, however, I think they are aware of this.

Ultimately, for me personally, the conference was a successful. Despite the presentation, it was interesting to see what the world's blogademics are up to. The best part was that it was fantastic opportunity to meet some bright people with great ideas, and I took it to the max. I bet you can't wait to read about the second leg of my trip, heading south to UT Austin.

2007-03-28T09:39:00.000+01:00

ICWSM
(International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media)

And to finish off the handy guide to search friendly key terms - Marriot, Boulder, Colorado, keynote, talks, papers, beer.

So, it's the end of day two of the conference (technically it's early day three...jet lag messes you up) and I thought I really ought to say something. But what to say, how much detail to go into? Lets talk meta-blogging the blog conference from an anecdotal perspective.

People (often) want to know what other people think of them: for example, if one gave a presentation at a conference, was one any good and were people interested in one's work? Traditionally, this can be hard to determine. However, when people write blogs, they may be inclined to comment upon events in which they have participated. When said event is a blog conference, then participants are talking about blogs and a majority (though very distinctly not all) are writing blogs.

And so too cut a long confusing story short, I know that a majority of attendees will be searching for blog posts on the conference. And the majority of that majority can't help themselves but look to see what is said about them. I dare you to say it isn't true!

So what is a conscientious and agreeable blogger such as myself to do? Do I start naming names? What if I don't name someone? Is that a negative reflection of my opinion of them. This is not as silly as it may sound: we've discussed a number of times in the last couple of days the etiquette of friend requests on social networking sites. Do you accept someone you know of, but don't really know, and what does that action say. Alternatively, I could comment on everyone, but what if I had something
negative to say? Do I really want to say that? Is bad news really better than no news?

And then what about when I head down to Texas? Whether the people I meet with are bloggers or not, they know I am, and will also be inclined to see what I may or may not say about them. You know, there really has not been enough discussion at this conference about the awkward social situations that one can find oneself in when blogging. And this is not at all influenced by not finding anyone blogging about me yet (though I'm sure this is just that the relevant posts have not yet been indexed).

So, to sum up - it's good to see some old friends, a shame that others didn't make it, but it's always nice to meet interesting new people. Now do the decent thing and at least leave a comment.

2007-03-01T10:07:00.000Z

A Tale of Two Talks

You'll be pleased to hear that I have already started preparing my ICWSM presentation so I have plenty of time to get it polished. However, I now also have a second talk to prepare. Following the conference, I've been invited to visit the Psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin. I'm being hosted by Sam Gosling and James Pennebaker. So if you're in the area and want to hear me talk or just come say hi, drop me a line. This is a great opportunity and the whole trip should be very interesting indeed.

2007-02-09T10:08:00.000Z

Whirlwind Of Me
(A quick summary of recent times)

That's right, it has been a while. So what has been happening you ask yourselves. Well:
I'm writing another ARC funding proposal. If that comes off, then there will be plenty to blog about as it will be a major study that I'd like all the key players to be involved in.
I managed to miss out on a few conference deadlines that were early in the year, I was just too busy, but I have a couple of publications in the pipeline.
I've been doing a spot of journal reviewing, which is a great opportunity and is really interesting.
Most recently, we had our paper accepted at ICWSM, which is always nice. They've published a list of the accepted papers, and it's looking like a really good conference. There are some really interesting titles in the list, and the author list is good too. There's a few names missing from CAAW last year, and a few very welcome additions, but from previous experience I can tell it's going to be a really good group of people. I've said it before, but if you are in anyway interested in being a blogademic, you'd be a fool to miss this.

2006-12-13T22:14:00.000Z

ADCS 2006

Was up in Brisbane for the weekend, culminating in my presenting at the Australasian Document Computing Symposium. It's always good to get opportunities to spread the words of blog, personality, and linguistic analysis. Objective self evaluation tells me that it wasn't my best talk. It's understandable though, because after such a long tiring weekend, my head just wasn't all there. The day did however afford me the chance to meet with a fellow socio-cognitively motivated explorer of blogs. There aren't many of us in the world, let alone here in Australia, so it's always good to foster relations. What else are such events for!

2006-11-28T22:14:00.000Z

Rent This Space

Blogs as advertising is certainly not a new idea. From having adverts on blogs, to creating a "blog" with the sole purpose of advertising a movie or soft drink. Does it work? I'm not the man in the know on this topic I'm afraid. However, I recently came across an interesting example that does appear to be working.

Amanda sent me a link to one of the blogs she reads Chubby Hubby, a food blogger in Singapore. It seems through his work and knowing the people that he and his wife knows, he has been able to put together a fantastic food-based prize from a well-respected chef. Now, this is a prize for him to give away purely on his blog. However, since it is being funded by a bank, entrants must be bank cardmembers.

Now whilst I'm sure his motives are mainly to give people an opportunity to enjoy a funky dessert-based meal, this will work out really well for the bank. Because it is not wholly an advertisement, and because people respect Hubby as a food blogger, people will want the chance to win. And to do that, people are going to need a card. Certainly people are expressing interest in his comments. I wonder just how successful a drive this will be for what will be comparatively little investment on the banks part when compared to regular advertising space.

2006-11-14T09:04:00.000Z

Conference Call

Well it's been a while since I went a month without posting. I got very good at updating things. But there have been less developments on the blog front recently, so I've had nothing to say. That is, until now.

Firstly, I have had a paper accepted to another conference. The Australasian Document Computing Symposium is clearly keen to hear about how to look at documents from the perspective of the personality of the author. Not only that, but I'm the final presentation of the single day event, so clearly those who attended the workshop in Melbourne recently were impressed with my performance. It's up in Brisbane in early December, about a week before we fly to the States for Christmas. It should be quite interesting, and it's always good to spread the word of blog further afield. Of course, I should probably tell my co-author...

In other conference news, the deadline is shortly approaching for the inaugural International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. This is being held in Boulder in late March and the deadline is December 8, right before the conference in Brisbane actually. Now any blogademic worth his salt will be there, so I highly encourage submission. That said, I really ought to get back to working on mine.

2006-10-04T04:42:00.000+01:00

Read My Lips
(Advertising a publication and a talk)

Some time back, Alastair Gill, Jon Oberlander and myself submitted a paper to the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. We recently found out that after making some edits, we have been accepted. This is very exciting news because it is my first journal publication. Journal publications are very exciting. They are worth more academically than conference papers, probably because they are more substantial. Of course this means they also take longer to write, longer to review, and just generally much longer to get published. I think as records going, from being just one year on from submitting my thesis, I'm doing pretty well. As soon as the final touches have been applied, and everything is given the green light, I shall post a link.

As well as the written word however, I am enjoying the trappings of the spoken word. I mentioned in my last post that I had been asked to give a talk here, as part of the HAIL series. Well my talk is next Tuesday at 11am local time. I will be summarising my thesis, and all the work I have done on blogs to date. But you don't just have to hear about it from me, you can actually watch it for yourselves. Although the link does not currently do anything, if you tune in at the right time (Tuesday 10th October, 11am AEST) you can watch the whole thing live. I'll be expecting plenty of questions and feedback.

2006-09-23T09:25:00.000+01:00

Workshop on Search

Thanks to the HCSNet, I was in Melbourne for a couple of days, as I mentioned before I left. Though search has not traditionally been my field, with my current work in text summarisation, I am moving into more related areas. It was therefore interesting to see what sort of things are being done in the field.

There were a number of interesting people in attendance including Jon Patrick from Sydney, and Ross Wilkinson from CSIRO Canberra. Also, Peter Bruza was there, who I recognized as the Australian (in this context he wasn't the only one :D) who spoke at the Blog Symposium I went to in Stanford earlier in the year.

Of course the highlight of the two days was the talk by the young dynamic researcher talking about personality in blogs. His talk had it all: interesting findings, entertaining presentation and delivery, and some very interesting ideas for potential directions in search.

Of course I was talking about me. Got some interest in my idea to search by personality (or more generally style) of the author rather than content of the text. I also got invited to give a talk back at Macquarie by the people at CSIRO. They had a cancellation, so I can do it in a couple of weeks rather than waiting until next year!

On the whole I'm not sure how successful the workshop was in fostering future relationships: there seemed to be a lot of personal issues brought to the table. I hope all the people who wanted something from it got what they needed. I'll let you know if anyone gets in touch wanting me on their team.

2006-09-20T04:01:00.000+01:00

Search Me

It's been a long time I know, but things have been busy here, settling into a new life and a new job. We're still finding our feet in both, but loving every minute of it. While I've been away, my office mate ... I mean my former office mate Tim, has also moved on. He's still with the university, but our office is no more as Tim very touchingly discusses.

I've also been writing a little. I knocked together a wee paper introducing my weblog work for a workshop in Sydney at the end of November. I've also been writing a short talk to give at a workshop on Next-Generation Search Technology that I am going to tomorrow. It's in Melbourne, so I'll be away for a couple of days. Not so's you'd notice from here :D

2006-08-31T06:31:00.000+01:00

Sydney Calling

What a very busy couple of weeks! I am writing this at an Internet station in Westfield Mall, Chatswood, Sydney. Not much to say on the blogademic front I'm afraid. I am not here currently to work in that capacity, although I hope to be able to keep up with the work, and there are definitely publications in the pipeline. For those of you more interested in how things are going, may I refer you to our other blog, Exit Music.

2006-08-11T16:34:00.000+01:00

Time Gentlemen Please

At those blogging conference things I've been attending these past few months, there have been a plethora of interesting blog statistics. One crowd-pleaser is always when people blog. Lots of nice time series data and graphs showing there are a lot of people blogging late into the night. The inevitable questions concern the lining up of blog post times from different parts of the world, alignment of timezones with providers etc. There's never a question about fibbing.

Having recently begun our own personal blog, Amanda and I have discovered the joys of flexible blogging. You want to post every day, but you find yourself with a lot to say late one evening. Why not make one post now, then write another, set the timestamp forward a few hours, and lo and behold at the appointed time it shall appear. Get in late, why not knock up a quick post, set the time back to the day before and your readers next morning will never know. Don't want to get caught blogging at work? Then set all your posts to 5:01pm.

Now there is noise in all data, and I'm not saying that this is a big problem in such temporal analyses. However, I feel it should at least be discussed, it may be a phenomenon in itself.

2006-08-04T17:46:00.000+01:00

But Is It Art??

That's a question applied often down the ages, but know we must seriously turn it to blogs. We've all seen blogs as books, but this year there are THREE shows at this years Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I first saw a poster for a show based on Baghdad Burning, "a young Iraqi's internet journal." Fair enough I thought, it's topical, could be poignant, it's a story people need to hear.

And then I read the BBC article about Blogger: Real Internet Diaries. This is a show from a producer who had previously never heard of blogs, but an old classmate pointed him to his. He and a friend had such fun "performing it for each other" (taking the piss more likes) that they decide to make a show out of blogs. They got agreement from ten british bloggers, and will be using their blogs, word for word. Now I'm not saying that these people's stories are no less worthy of telling, but it just seems like really lazy storytelling.

Day 1 - "Oh man, the Edinburgh Festival is coming up and we need a show. What are we going to do??"

Day 2 - "What are blogs? I've never heard of them...oh really...and people reveal EVERYTHING? What an odd concept. How funny."

Day 3 - "Wait a minute..."

Heck, maybe I'm not being very fair...it might good...but it just seems like cashing in on a trend to me.

2006-07-26T14:36:00.000+01:00

Can I Say This?

Imagine you work a regular job and at the same time you have a blog in which you talk about that work. Now that job evolves into your becoming a secret agent, sworn to secrecy and all that. Then what do you blog about?

Some might say that this is a HUGE exaggeration of my current working situation. Those doubters and nay-sayers would be right. Now I'm not a secret agent (I'm too short sighted), but I'm working on stuff that isn't ready to be public yet. So what am I supposed to talk to here, the blog of my work?

I can probably tell you that I am playing with a lot of data. More then I've ever worked with before. And let me tell you, when you are programming simple straightforward data manipulation code, and using simple straightforward shell commands like wc (counts words in a file) huge tracts of data make for long periods of waiting for me and thinking for my machine. It gets worse when running simple straightforward code with errors. I've lost a good couple days that way. Start a process running, go home, come back the next day to find it failed halfway through the night with nothing salvageable.

From this data, I can tell you I am learning some interesting things. There are, for example, a lot of bloggers!! Who knew?! I mean I always thought we were the only ones. Jon will be interested in my findings...just as soon as he gets back from Australia.

2006-07-12T12:15:00.000+01:00

Blog Vs Blog
(Personal Vs Professional)

Recently Amanda and I started a blog to talk about our move to Australia, to document the process involved in getting there as well as our day to day activities leading up to the big move and beyond. It is very much a co-authored personal blog. It's one of those blogs that let us keep our friend informed of our progress, it will help us keep in touch with them when we head off, and if anyone else wants to read it that is fine.

It's made me think of a few things though. Firstly, we don't put absolutely everything in the blog, but at least all the more significant occurrences go in. Turns out when all your friends read your blog you have very little news left to tell them. Makes for quite one-sided catch up chats. Secondly, I am still not used to the fact that people make comments about or refer to things in the blog, when I haven't told them personally. It takes a second of thinking "how do they know that?" before realising that we put it in the blog.

My third thought concerns the boundaries and crossover between the two blogs - between the personal and the work blog. First the crossover. For the most part, the distinction between the two blogs is clear: I wrote a paper, here; I saw some friends, there. However, when it comes to talking about the recent work on the rejoinder for my postdoc funding while it's technically about my research, it's also about getting us to Australia, so where do I talk about it. I guess the answer is talk about things like that in both places, but talk about them in different ways. More technical academic details here, less there. Of course, there is also more to say over there, as there may be work things I can't talk about, or am not ready to publish, so I update here less frequently.

Secondly, boundaries. There are concerns I guess for anyone trying to maintain distinct personal and professional blogs. You want colleagues/collaborators to be able to read about your work, your ideas etc, but you don't necessarily want them to read that story about the time you embarrassed yourself highly in a public place...or something. I guess I'm lucky that my personal blog doesn't say anything I wouldn't want anyone to read, and this blog isn't strictly professional. I'm not trying to hide who I am by having two distinct blogs, there is still a good deal of my personality in here (I can say that because I'm the expert :D) and I don't mind if people interested in me professionally want to learn more about me.

And finally, it occurs to me that post tags would have been really helpful in this blog. We have included them over yonder, but I guess that is because we could. I don't know if it is because this blog is old, but I don't even have a separate title box as I write a post, let alone tag boxes. Tags would be good because it would make it clear when I was talking about PhD progress, publications, or thoughts on blogging such as this post. Oh well.

2006-07-03T17:43:00.000+01:00

Like A Bee

Not in the stinging sense, but in the keeping busy sense. Although we were mainly off on our holiday recently, I've been kept busy recently with various things that required completion. First there were some minor adjustments to the poster for CoLing/ACL. Another conference that requires I change our lovingly formatted landscape poster into portrait. It's a pain because you go to all the effort of realignment, and here the template doesn't even come out right in portrait, and some people haven't even bothered. These troublemakers promptly stick their poster on top of other peoples since the boards are not big enough to accommodate them.

With the poster done I could focus on the rejoinder for my postdoc funding. Answering the reviewers points was a really good exercise. As well as being able to address any flaws in the original proposal, it gives you an opportunity to add details you didn't have space for in the original strict 10 pages. Of course, it is only a small opportunity, since you have a very strict limit of 5000 characters. That was hard. It's not that I had a hard time answering points, just that there were a lot of little queries, and I didn't want to be seen to be ignoring any. So I answered them as best I could, included all the relevant information, such as my post-submission publications, and submitted after we got back (I was working within hours of us landing in Edinburgh).

Speaking of publications, I have now officially submitted a journal paper. I was informally reviewed by some of our peers, we got a good response and the paper looks good. All credit to my co-authors who worked on it a lot while I was away.

And then to Australia. The visa process which seemed to have stalled is now back on track. Last week, on our anniversary no less, we received the confirmation that our nomination was successful and we could move on to the application proper. And so we did. Filled it in and lodged it online. There are more details for those who are interested in the other blog.

And then it's on with work. Obviously we will continue to do whatever needs to be done to get ourselves to Sydney, otherwise I shall be working away like a good little blogademic.

2006-06-21T17:12:00.000+01:00

Right To Reply
(Writing A Rejoinder)

So along with the job (visa application underway) I applied for postdoc funding to continue my work at Macquarie. This week is rejoinder week. I had never heard of such a thing until just the week before. Essentially, for those of you like me, this is an opportunity to respond to criticisms halfway through the application procedure.

As it stands, I have received three anonymous reviews on my application. My rejoinder is an essay in which I answer any criticisms in these. This document plays a large part when the final committee meets to decide upon my application. So it's got to be good. It's a shame there are only a few days to do it in. Lucky for me that I got pretty good reviews!!

2006-06-11T15:07:00.000+01:00

A Post(er)
(Preparing for a Conference)

So it was around this time last year that in preparation for taking a poster to Cogsci in Stresa, I took part in our local jamboree. So this year, in preparation for CoLing/ACL in Sydney, I made a poster for the jamboree. Unfortunately, it was being held at Kings Buildings which is a couple of miles south of the office, and I have been really busy this week so only went on the first day.
It wasn't quite as sucessful as last year's jamboree. I put this down to the venue. Not that I have anything against the computer scientists that are forced out of town from the rest of the university (all the scientists are) because I used to be one. It's just that they have such completely different research interests. No vision...that's what it is. Our work concerns language, so fits well in the remit of our group, but within Informatics as a whole, it's hard to generate interest. But we know our work is important so that's what matters.
Of course a lack of feedback doesn't bother me. It is actually Jon who will be taking the poster to Sydney, so if it's rubbish, on his head be it. Of course, I made it, and my name is on it so...well...

2006-06-07T12:52:00.000+01:00

Writing a Journal
(...Paper)

So yet another thing has been keeping me busy this past week or so. Have been talking with colleagues about doing a paper together for a couple of years now. Based on some of the earlier stuff I did in my thesis and the similar work Alastair did in his. The idea is that by putting them together we show some good support for even earlier work. You know, replicating factors in alternative places. Well, that paper has finally been coming to fruition in the last couple of months. We are not sure where we are going to put it, but it is definitely a journal paper. This of course means it may be some time before it actually sees the light of day.

It is one things that I've come to realise on this academic path: work in journals is not new. For the most part, it can take a very long time to get from initial submission, through the review process, to final publication. They also take longer to write. When you get results it is easy (and highly tempting) to knock up some conference papers. They are shorter, come with a holiday attached, they are more accessible and more current. However, journals carry significantly more weight, and so it is well advised to produce journal papers. Even if you don't get any during the period of your thesis, it is strongly advised that you look to turn your thesis into journal publications. Not least because it doesn't look good to be constantly citing an unpublished thesis, and papers are easier for others to reference.

Journal papers are tough. You are looking at 30-50 pages, as opposed to 6-8 for a conference. And it is particularly difficult communicating between and editing with multiple authors. However, journal papers are well worth the effort...or so I am told!!

2006-05-30T14:47:00.000+01:00

A Whole New World
(Don't Look Down, We've A New Blog)

As I mentioned the other day I had the idea that Amanda and I should blog our experiences as we prepare to start our new life in Australia. This is of course NOT just pure blogosphere vanity, but it will be a good way to keep friends here (and across the world) up to date on our goings on. I've recommended it to a number of people going on long trips...why write multiple emails saying roughly the same thing (or even one mass email) when you could blog it!

So Amanda has set this up and got the ball rolling. Go check out our [Exit Music].

2006-05-30T14:21:00.000+01:00

Who Are you
(ACL Classification Paper Online)

So we have finally prepared the final version of our CoLing/ACL paper on the classification of text be personality of author. I've previously discussed some of our reasons for attempting this: knowing more about an individual can help better model aspects of their language, such as their expression of sentiment. Here I just want to give you a brief introduction to what we were trying to do with this toe-dipping paper. The methodology is quite simple in terms of automated classification, and our approach is relatively straightforward, but looking at the areas we did made sense for our first move in this direction. Essentially, we experimented with two significant factors, the feature set, and the division of data points.
Feature set: we begin with a pseudo bag-of-words approach using word bi- and tri-grams (sequences of two and three words). We investigated reducing the feature set statistically, in order to see how efficient a classifier we could produce. Many simple classification systems throw the frequency of say 100s or 1000s of words at an algorithm, but we wanted to keep it minimal.

To do this we used the approaches described in my thesis to establish a relationship between n-grams and each personality trait. This consisted of determining which n-grams were significantly used by high and low scoring groups, more than anyone else. This reduces the set considerably, and produces better results than just throwing everything in the pot.

Division of dataset: When dealing with personality in the thesis, we used a statistical approach to divide the corpus along each trait into high, medium and low subgroups. It occurred to us however that there were different ways to do this, all of which similarly statistically valid. Different approaches also enabled better comparison to similar work.

The most obvious task is binary classification between high and low groups, and so we split the corpus three different way. From there we attempted multi-class classification, by combining those varietals with the different medium group. We even attempted five different classes. Results vary, but as you would expect high accuracy is achieved on easier tasks.
I'll not sit here explaining the entire paper - although it seems like I have just done so. I just want to give you a brief idea of the direction we took in our work, because the methodology does appear quite basic. Obviously this is just the first work of this ilk of many that we intend to produce, so watch this space for further developments. If anyone wants to talk about the work, ask questions or give general feedback, I'd love to hear from you.

2006-05-28T23:12:00.000+01:00

Men at Work

A post title with even more hidden meanings and available interpretations than normal. So I got official confirmation this past week, that I have been offered a job that I applied for back at the beginning of March. I did the interview at the end of March, while I was in Palo Alto in fact. I didn't like to say anything because... well... I just didn't. Needless to say though, I can now confirm that I got the job.

What's more it's exactly where we want to be: Sydney, Australia. I cannot tell you how excited Amanda and I are at the prospect of the big move down under. We having been looking forward to leaving behind the grey and starting a whole new life for so long now. It's just going to be (expressive word of the day) awesome!!

I had a thought this morning...we should blog it. You know, what we do to get there, our thoughts once we arrive, document our experiences in the hope that we may one day aid and encourage other fledgling migrants. There are zabillions of bloggers out there doing the same thing, with so few readers available, but I'm not sure that really matters. Of course, it's hard enough to keep one blog updated so...

2006-05-24T20:51:00.000+01:00

The Wonderful World of Weblogs
(At the WWW Conference)

Attended the Workshop on Weblogging Ecology (WWE) at the World Wide Web (WWW) conference yesterday. Didn't have to travel far as it was being hosted here in Edinburgh. What tipped me off that this was a big deal of a conference, beyond the camera crews filming stuff, and the fact that parts made the news, was that Jack McConnell, Scotland's First Minister was among the opening speakers. Of course, I was only there for the workshop, so I had a bit of a lie in.

I suppose given the 5000 miles, it's not surprising that there weren't so many faces familiar from the CAAW symposium I was at in March. It did offer an opportunity to catch up with Matt and Natalie of BlogPulse, along with meeting Thomas Lento from Cornell, who I didn't get a chance to talk to in Palo Alto.

The day was pretty interesting. Mostly different work from CAAW, with just a smidgeon of overlap. Disappointingly there was little work on the language of blogs from a sociobiographic perspective, but there really aren't that many of us.

One interesting difference is that BlogPulse released a blog corpus for people to work with. The aim was to report the results of what you did with it at the conference. This is a standard idea in technical conferences, but the first time I've seen it done. The obvious follow up was the discussion section of the day: the topic was around the general idea of creating a really good corpus for all to share. There were lots of good ideas, and everybody is very keen. The tricky part is finding people to do the work: the cleaning, removing splogs etc. Of course no corpus would be of use to me without some serious demographic labeling, and that sort of data doesn't just grow on trees.

One interesting observation concerning the days blogademics...very few of them blog. I got that impression at CAAW, but here we were asked to write our name, affiliation, email and blog URL if we had them. I was near the back as the paper was passed around and a quick scan revealed very few URLs. I know I've made this point before, and I'm not saying people have to blog to study blogs...it just wouldn't hurt.

All in all it was a pretty good day and I got a neat bag!

2006-05-19T14:32:00.000+01:00

Updating Reality
(So What's Been Happening)

Well, somehow I got into a pattern of posting once a week on a Wednesday. This wasn't initially deliberate, but you know, it became a bit of a thing. And then I missed last week because I was just too busy. So I start thinking I should post on another day, so Weblog Wednesday doesn't become a fully ingrained thing. And then it reached this most recent Wednesday and I figured why not! Once more, however, I was busy. So here I am determined to post, because so much has been happening, and I'm going to break it down into bullet points because they can be easier to read.
I have been working quite a bit the last weeks making the final corrections to my thesis. Amanda read the entire thesis for me and identified an impressive number of errors (I have an odd habit of pluralising things in an unnecessarily Ali G ways, and singularising things when there are lot of them [sic]). I've extended my literature review appropriately, which includes significantly rearranging the middle section. I've replaced linear regression with logistic regression for gender, and I added in a paragraph that LaTeX had decided to remove.

The appropriate documentation is with the exam board, the thesis is at the library for fancy dan hard back binding, and the electronic copy has been updated for your reinvigorated reading pleasure.

I have volunteered to help run some perception experiments. The experiments themselves are pretty straightforward, requiring little more than starting groups off and being around to deal with any issues. However, lining up subjects takes a little more effort. This is my first experience with this since my data gathering was done on-line, so I didn't have to worry about such things. It'll be good experience though.

Still not had a chance to look at the corrections required for the ACL paper I talked about last time. They are due pretty soon though so I'll be getting right onto them. not least so that I can finally post the finished paper here and in my web space. We are also thinking about doing another poster for the local event, but the deadline for that is also soon so we'll see.

I am also supposed to be going to the Weblogging Ecosystem workshop next week. It is part of the World Wide Web Conference which is actually being held here in Edinburgh. This makes it very easy to get to, but we haven't sorted out registration yet. Leaving it late I know, online registration has certainly closed. It is being co-chaired by Matt Hurst (amongst others) who I may have mentioned previously. A bit of a homecoming for Matt, getting to see all his old haunts.
There are a few other things which I could talk about, but I feel I've taken enough of people's time right here, so I'll save these for another day. I'm not even going to mention the issues I've been having concerning broken glasses, new trial mis-aligned contact lenses, and withdrawn cleaning solution!!

2006-05-03T20:04:00.000+01:00

Get In There
Conference Acceptance

So I finally heard the news I had been expecting for the past couple of months: our paper was accepted to CoLing/ACL. For anyone who doesn't know, this conference brings together two of the largest (if not the two largest) computational linguistics conferences around. A super conference if you will. This year it is being hosted in Sydney. Which will be very nice. It will technically be winter over there, but no doubt it'll still be nicer than much of the summer over here.

I shall say more about the contents of the paper when I get a chance to post a link to it (I'm blogging from home right now, and I'd like to see the reviewers comments first). The title kind of lets you know what it's about though:

Whose thumb is it anyway? Classifying author personality from weblog text.
The title refers to fact that many of the early papers in sentiment analysis made some allusion to their movie review data (for example) as being good or bad - thumbs up or down. Sentiment analysis is very popular at the moment. There were a good many talks/posters at the recent symposium which dealt with detecting and classifying sentiment from weblogs. Our main argument though, and this has been suggested by others, is that one persons four star review is another persons two (Pang & Lee, 2005).

Think about it.

If women are more comfortable expressing feelings and emotions than men, surely the language they use to review something will be different. The same can be said for people with different personality types. Consider these totally made up examples - entirely believable if you've read a lot of blogs:

Wow! That was incredible! The acting was fantastic, the dialogue was sharp and polished and it held me from the off. Brilliant. Superb! I enjoyed that so very very much. Film of the year. Amazing.
Went to the cinema tonight. Film was really good. Had a good night.
Imagine these were written by the same person. It's obvious they liked film one more than film 2. Imagine however, that the first is written by an expressive highly Open Extravert, and the second a less Open Introvert. It is possible that these two people saw the same film, that they liked it very much, and if asked to give it a score, would both give it full marks. Any direct comparison between the two and the second is far less positive. If you were to take into account the natural style of the two authors however, it might be possible to rank the second as high as the first, giving a much more accurate picture of how much a product is liked (or of course disliked).

Well anyway, that is just a brief bit about why we are classifying text by author personality. I'll hopefully get the paper up soon, and I shall definitely say more about what we did. I also hope to tell you more about a little project that's recently been confirmed.

2006-04-26T22:17:00.000+01:00

But Not For Godot
(Notification of Acceptance Due)

It's always the same when you are waiting for things to happen. Even if you have a date, you are hoping things will happen early. They never do, but you still come in every day expecting to see the email, and ultimately you start every day with a sense of disappointment. We are supposed to hear about our recent conference submission at the end of this week. We know it's good work but we are keen to see how well it has gone over within a circle we've not previously moved in.

If nothing else, hearing that we have been accepted confirms the to-be-published status of the work and we can start letting people have a look at it. I think it's interesting stuff, and from the people we have talked with, we've had some good feedback. I've been waiting to talk more about it for a couple of months now. What we've done puts it among the first generation of work to attempt to do so, and we are hoping it will be just the start of something awesome.
I hope I've not built it up too much...no...how can I...it's great stuff!

2006-04-19T13:26:00.000+01:00

He's In Fashion
(Symposium Feedback)

So I was interested to read some feedback on my post reviewing the recent CAAW symposium for it made Amanda and I very proud. I'm proud because someone enjoyed the humour in my slides (I could tell from the giggles that not everyone noticed/got my references). I think humour is important in conference/symposium presentations. When you are to be listening to talks all day long it can become very tedious if they are all completely dry and boring. I like to educate AND entertain. Also, if you want just the facts, academically presented, the paper is always there to be read. So I'm honoured that someone appreciated my attempts to bring a smile to the proceedings.

Amanda, my wife and stylist is proud that I am considered among the best dressed attendees :D She gave herself a pat on the back, and is delighted her work is getting some recognition. We both thank you.

You being a newbie in the world of blog research - Erin O'Connor, doing her M.A. at San Diego looking to extract temporal expression from blogs. She claims she doesn't have much to say about it at this point, but i'm sure she will. It is an interesting direction to come from, and could yield some good results for future study of blogs.

2006-04-12T21:40:00.000+01:00

I made this
Consumer Generated Media

So this was an expression I first heard at the recent AAAI Weblog symposium - weblogs are a type of consumer generated media. With weblogs and wikis and comments and podcasts and all the different ways technology is enabling the people to have a voice, it makes sense to have one term to rule them all. However, that I heard the term used first in the industry panel, and the very use of the word consumer, the intention is clear.

We are fodder. What for has not been decided yet, but it was clear that the panel are looking for uses for the media they allow their users...sorry, consumers...to generate. Hey, we designed this cool tool that you like using, what are you going to give to us? It's all wrapped up in enabling the consumer though. Hey, if we know more about you, we can help you better. There is talk of marketing of money, the user is a consumer not a customer - the customers are people who pay the big bucks, the advertisers, the marketing men, the governments...maybe. Personalisation is the future!

Of course, this leaves me in a somewhat hypocritical position. Of all the things that you can learn about a person...their favourite soft drink, what kind of movies they like, how many friends they have/want...surely the most personal thing you can learn is their personality. Now, I know that everyone is different and my work makes generalisations...but still, I am aiming to learn about personality from langauge. People don't like to be pigeonholed, people don't like to be put in a box with all the people they are supposed to be the same as...but at the same time, people love to know what makes them different and unique.
I'm honestly not sure where I'm going with this. I guess it's one of those stream of consciousness posts you here about on the blogvine. I'd be interested to here what other people think about this? How do you feel about services being tailored to meet you specific requirements? How far do you think this should go? Are you okay with only being different from most people?
Just a little something to contemplate over the Easter weekend. I'll be interested to see what people have to say upon my return from the Cotswolds.

2006-04-05T15:34:00.000+01:00

This Post Has No Title

When you are trying to find out what someone is saying in a blog, you look to their posts ... obviously! For a quick summary you look to the title. It is really helpful, particularly when searching for information, if the title of the post is relevant to the content. Anyone who has read this blog for some time will be aware that while mine are, it is often tenuous and obscure. It is hard sometimes to see what my post may be about from the title. Subsequently, unless I use specific words in my posts, someone searching for information of which I may have something to say may not find my sage words. There was a great deal of talk at the symposium of searching in blogs, I know it is a big deal these days.

Does this mean I should stop titling the way I do? Notice that I titled the last post as accurately as I could in case anynoe from the symposium was searching for people's thoughts on the events. Should I introduce a second more specific sub-title? Much like my Master's thesis, smart AND practical: Being John Motson - Towards a computation model of football commentary.

2006-04-03T14:35:00.000+01:00

AAAI CAAW-2006 Review

As promised a more full review of the symposium. For starters, our observation when we arrived in Palo Alto is that it is a very new place, very artificial. It has some very nice restaurants, though there are very few bars, and the place basically has no atmosphere. Maybe it was that we where there in Spring Break, but I'm not sure thousands of student would have made it any better. A soul-less place.

Stanford University has a very impressive campus, which covers a lot of space. It was a very good thing that they do a handy bus service taking you round the campus, otherwise we would have had no idea where to go. They really do have everything you could possibly want on campus. Very insulated community. Lots of squirrels.

So the symposium...As I said in the previous post there were some very interesting talks. There was quite a lot on sentiment/opinion extraction from weblogs, there was work on friend recommendation, there was a comparison on scoops in blogs versus newspapers, and a number of very interesting talks from the folks at Nielson Buzzmetrics. There was a panel session with various industry folk, but to be honest it could have been far more interesting. Good to see bitching and snideness present everywhere.

And of course, then there was the work most relevant to mine, that concerned with age and gender identification. Lots of similar things found in many different ways. Very interesting.

So I also got to talk to very interesting people. I got a good chance to chat with Buzzmetrics' Matt Hurst covering plenty of on-topic ideas and, Matt being ex of Edinburgh, many an off-topic reminiscence (turns Matt and I both learnt Japanese at the same place).

I was also very fortunate to get to talk to Shlomo Argamon. Most of my work has some reference to his studies, particularly his gender classification work. It was unfortunate that we did not get as much time to talk shop and throw ideas around as I would have liked. His recent work is the closest to what we have been doing recently, and he has a lot of really good ideas.

I had some very interesting discussions with many other people besides: Mirko Tavosanis at Pisa, Diego Reforgiato from Maryland, Richard Tong of Tarragon Consulting, Sandy Rosenburg from Media Research Associates, Hong Qu all the way from Berkeley and Bettina Berendt from Humboldt, Berlin. I'm sure there are more, so I'm sorry if I've not mentioned anyone.

Too much waffle I know, so in summary it was a very interesting symposium, well worth attending. There is some very interesting work out there, and some very interesting people. Yes, I've said interesting a lot, but it really was. Now I just have to report back to Jon about as much as I can remember - I don't actually know if he actually reads this?! Finally, thanks to Nicolas Nicolov for all the help with my attendance, and Doug Oard for not only being entertaining, but for being the only to person to cite our work!! How lax of everyone else!

2006-03-31T12:00:00.000+01:00

It Never Rains In California

But man it pours!!! Seriously, it was a record breakingly wet March in California, which was nice.

So Amanda and I are currently in Amsterdam, with a nother few hours to kill before our flight home. It may very well be 1pm here, but our bodies are tell us it's 3 am. I think we'll just collapse when we get back.

So I promise to post more about our wee trip, and particularly about the symposium soon. In summary, it was a good trip, and the symposium went very well, met a lot of interesting people, had a lot of interesting conversations, and heard about some very interesting work.

Until then though...you'll just have to wait!

2006-03-25T22:43:00.000Z

The Hills Have Eyes

That may not necessarily be the case here in San Francisco, but it is fair to say that there are many hills. I know they only show hills in movies, particularly car chase ones, but when you drive into the city it doesn't seem that bad. But then you take a walk. At an given junction you may be facing a sheer drop or a steep climb.

Can I just say at this point Airbus 330s rule!! Normally when we come to the States its on a Boeing, and it is the usual movie, meal, cramped space deal. But not this time. Despite a delay which severely put our connection from Detroit at risk, the airline lovingly provided a plane with a mini screen in every seat, a list of movies to watch at your convenience, and all sorts of games and music. It was really good. Made the 8 hour flight fly by. Unlike the 5 hours flight after that, which was terrible. Arriving at what your body thinks is 6 am is never fun!

But so far SF has been pretty good to us. Good food, good shopping, good beer, it seems like a good little city...in spite of the hills. Heading down to Palo Alto tomorrow in preparation for the symposium starting on Monday. I'm hoping it is a little flatter!

2006-03-21T23:15:00.000Z

On The Road

Yes indeed, the time has finally come to depart on another Nowson adventure, although self-discovery and other tree-hugging hippy crap are not necessarily on the agenda. (Note my subtle blending of pop-culture references there.)

In the morning we make our way to the airport, having already checked in by the power of web, and begin our trip to San Francisco via Amsterdam and Detroit. Though the journey may be arduous, and hopefully not too perilous, we are both very much looking forward to it. My wife is particularly looking forward to showing me the greater range of dining experiences that San Francisco has to offer. I don't see any need to serve food later than 9pm, but apparently it's all the rage :-)

It promises to be a very enjoyable trip, and I shall endeavour to let you know how it goes.

2006-03-21T22:58:00.000Z

Should Blogademics Blog?

I think this is an interesting question. Should those of us who study blogs also maintain a blog? Getting into the spirit of the medium so to speak. It is a question I tried to pose on the blog set up for participants of the symposium on blogs I am attending next week. The answer was unanimous...in that nobody responded. Now I know that some of the speakers do have blogs, but it also appears that many of them do not.

At first I thought that was a bit of a poor show. If you are going to study blogs, then you should have a blog, talk about your work. It just makes sense.

This is of course a very silly thing to think, for two reasons. The first concerns the content of the blog. A traditional blog is an online diary, and not everyone wants to publically publish details of their personal lives. Alternatively, a blog contains details of work, and acts as a repository for academic thoughts and musings, which again not everyone wants to share.

The second is a more general point that really concerns study of or indeed interest in any topic. We don't expect all literature types to be writers, and not everyone who likes art needs to be an artist. Just because I blog, doesn't mean that other blogademics should. After all, blogging is not for
everyone.

2006-03-13T16:23:00.000Z

West Coast Conference

So everything is pretty much in place for our trip to Stanford for the AAAI symposium. We've booked our accommodation and we're pretty close to the University. If anyone managed to wangle funding to stay at the penthouse suite of the Garden Court Hotel, be officially warned of your fellow attendees' jealousy.

The first draft of the schedule has been announced and it's really the first time I've had the chance to see who else will be attending. There are a number of interesting people who it will be good to be able to meet. Some very interesting looking talks.

Of course, as with our trip last summer, my wife and I are making more of a wee holiday out of it. Before we head down to Palo Alto, we are going to be in San Francisco for 4 days. Besides seeing the city we are plaaing on making a wine tasting trip up to Napa or Sonoma. Also, my wife is going to take me to my first theme park to take me on my first roller coaster. A scary proposition, but exciting and I'm very looking forward to the whole trip.

2006-03-02T21:02:00.000Z

Achieving Things

The theme of this post is talking about things that have been accomplished recently. Firstly, I finally completed the final draft of my application for funding from the Australian Research Council to do my post-doc at Macquarie next year. Obviously I can't tell you what the proposal concerned, since you might steal my idea and I wouldn't get funding. I can tell you though that it is a natural extension of my current work, taking into account new areas of interest.

Speaking of my current work, Jon and I just completed our submission for the big ACL/CoLing conference in Sydney in the summer. Again, I'm afraid I'm unable to give you too many details, because they are quite strict about reviewing work anonymously, and if say too much, I might compromise that. However, we are both very excited about the work in the paper, and I like the think that you might apply words such as unique and ground-breaking to it.
The final item on today's agenda is to say congratulations to Dr Tim Smith (AKA Continuity Boy) on a rather successful thesis defence. Welcome to the club. It is honour and a privelige to have such a good friend join us.

2006-02-20T16:20:00.000Z

Friends in Far Flung Places

Ok, so Poland is not really that far flung, but it's certainly an interesting direction for an email to come from. It turns out Krzysztof Kredens of University of Łódź in Poland has been reading my thesis and weblog. Noticing that I have been asked to expand my literature review by my examiners, Krzysztof emailed me to suggest some references I might be interested in. Krzysztof studies langauge and individual differences from a forensic authorship attribution perspective. This is an area I had begun to look at back in the day, but got lost in other directions. At the very least, a superficial examination of this area should heartily bolster the robustness and coverage of my literature review.

So thank you very much Krzysztof. And if there is any one else with any ideas of areas I should look at I'd really appreciate any pointers. Among the areas I'm looking into are langauge and gender studies, particularly from a feminist perspective, and what makes a genre a genre.

2006-01-29T17:03:00.000Z

Words Pouring From My Fingers

Well it's been a busy couple of weeks I can tell you. I've been putting together the final draft of the paper for the AAAI-CAAW workshop I've been invited to. That required lots of work starting us off in the direction we were hoping to take the blog study in. Since the paper is so short, it's a really brief skim through just some aspects of the thesis, but it will be interesting to turn it into a talk. I've also been trying to sort out funding for flights to Stanford (a few days in San Fran sounds like a nice trip sweetener). Do we want the hassle of changing planes? Or do we want a long haul direct flight leaving at 6am?

Most importantly, I've been putting together my research proposal for a postdoctoral fellowship in Australia. There's quite a lot to it with all the form filling, so I'm very busy at the moment. After that it does take some (many) months to hear back and it wouldn't even start until 2007. So I'm still looking to get me some work in Australia in the meantime because we are getting keener and keener to go by the days. We've been looking at property, watching shows about relocating to Australia, it is definitely for us. The sooner the better as far as we're concerned.

2006-01-16T14:46:00.000Z

Signs

So I never got around to posting all about my upcoming plans, though I shall try to do that this week. Needless to say, a number of those plans concern Australia and our desire to move there. Wherever we go, we were always planning on leaving. So having just gotten back from a month in the States, there have been an increasing number of signs that we should definitely leave as soon as possible.

Firstly, after a very long day of travelling...heavy planes, bad weather, diversions, delays, missed flights...we got home to find that we had been black balled by the only takeout that we wanted. Pizza hut had decided, just three days earlier, that they were no longer going to deliver to our area, which I would like to point out is in the middle of the city. To cap off several days of further frustrating disappointments (people/services being withdrawn, stores no longer stocking anything), I foolishly joked that our grocery stores would be shut when we went shopping yesterday.

Stupid, stupid boy.

The main store we go to, thought being roughly only a year old, was indeed closed for refurbishments, with no date for re-opening. If you believe in these things, then there are few clearer ways for the city of my birth to tell me I'm no longer wanted.

2005-12-28T18:22:00.000Z

Ubiquitous Yearly Review

I thought that since I am off on a wee break, I thought the best thing to post would be one of those look back at the year that's been thing with a look ahead to the year to come.
So I guess the most significant thing of this last year has been that I finished the PhD. Looking back, I'm sure the last four years could have gone far more efficiently than they did but that's the gift of hindsight. There's so many things I could say to people just starting their PhD, things that I've learnt that would really help get the thing done. I might blog some of them sometime, but really, if anyone had tried to teach me these lesson I'm not sure it would have made any difference. Everyone finds their own path.
Needless to say I've worked harder this year than ever before. By the end, it was every day, every night, every weekend. It's tough on you and on loved ones. You just have to grin and bear it because finishing is such a satisfying release. I wish everyone doing a PhD the best of luck, particularly my office mate Continuity Boy who is due to submit real soon.
But back to me. In September I submitted my thesis and it really did feel good. The postgraduate office was at the furthest end of the edge of town campus of the university and when I came out it was raining. But I didn't care. I had my I-pod with me and an amazingly weird feeling of relief and accomplishment. Not only was it a great achievement but it gave me time back to spend with my wife.
Getting my viva/defence sorted for December was pretty good and I must admit to looking forward to the grilling. I gave a talk before hand that was well received, attended by more people than I had expected. My viva the next day was alarmingly short. I was prepared for a three hour marathon, but when they opened by telling me they had already decided I had passed, I knew it would go well. It was a very enjoyable conversation, they both clearly enjoyed the thesis. It was a great complement. Upon returning after their conference, they welcomed me back by simply shaking my hand and congratulating me on becoming Doctor Nowson. It was a very proud moment in my life. It still hasn't really sunk in. I passed.
Obviously there are still some things to iron out but I'm going to save that for next time. I've actually written more here than I thought I was going to, so I shall save my look at what's coming up for another day.
Hope everyone is having a good holiday season.

2005-12-13T16:29:00.000Z

This Surreal Life

So, I've officially been a doctor for a few days now and to be honest, I'm not entirely sure if it has sunk in or not. Occasionally I'll have a moment where it just pops into my head that I passed...that I am Scott Nowson, Ph. D. But other times it seems like nothing is really different.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I'm off. I will hopefully still blog, but I won't be in Edinburgh for a wee while. I'm off to the US with Amanda for christmas, for a nice long overdue well deserved break.

2005-12-10T17:07:00.000Z

That's DOCTOR Nowson

So, as you might imagine, it went very well. Apparently 1 hour and 25
minutes is really quick for a viva :D It was a very enjoyable experience
to be honest, to sit down with such experienced academics and discuss my
work. Starting by telling me that I had passed and that they found my work
very interesting probably helped the whole thing go smoothly. There are
few areas of the background that they would like me to explore further, but
beyond that they really liked it.

What a cause to celebrate. So off we went to the local beer
purveyors, where my supervisor was the first to by me a drink. Caught up
with friends, had some lovely food, and today woke up for the first time as a
Doctor. Hooray!!!

2005-12-08T12:50:00.000Z

A Standing Ovation

Well not quite, but from my point of view at least it went very well. My darling wife came with me, after hearing a much poorer run through last night, office mates, my supervisor, my internal examiner for my viva tomorrow, a few assorted people I knew and some I didn't.

Obviously condensing a whole thesis into a short space of time is tough: it was very much the briefest of summaries. But on the whole people seemed to keep up. There were some good questions and I noticed much fervent note taking. AND I got to play with a remote mouse laser pointer doohicky.

So now I'm off to just read and read and read up for my viva tomorrow.

2005-12-08T10:31:00.000Z

Mi-Mi-Mi

That's right, it's time to tune up those vocal cords. In half an hour I'm giving a departmental talk summarising my thesis as part of the preparation for my viva. Wish me luck.

2005-11-30T20:32:00.000Z

California, Here I Come

When I got in today, I had a very nice email in my inbox. It was an invitation to attend the AAAI spring symposium on Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs. It’s being hosted by Stanford University. I am very excited about being able to attend such a presigious event.

If you have a look at the programme committee there are some very interesting people (from some very interesting places doing very interesting work) involved in the symposium. It really is a fantastic opportunity to meet people in the field, get myself and my work better known and learn even more about research in the area.

2005-11-28T22:41:00.000Z

Blogging as Thought Process

I've been getting a few emails recently from people who have been reading my thesis, and have had questions about it. However, I got a very interesting email the other day that wasn't directly about my work. It was in fact about this very blog.
As you may (or may not) be aware, this isn't really a personal blog. It is about my work on blogs, I've reported how my PhD has been going, discussed associated thoughts. Essentially, the avid blog reader who emailed wondered how much, if at all, keeping this blog helped me prosper academically. I may, or may not have discussed this before, but it felt right to do it again.

The media reports on academics using blogs as places to put down their ideas, discuss their work, keep written notes. This I have pretty much done. And I think it has helped. I'm not the sort of person who generally gets round to writing down all the smart ideas I have. But with this blog, I have tried, on occasion, to do so. Having to write down a thought coherently is an excellent way of solidifying the idea within. Having to explain something to someone else is always the best way of making sure you understand it. You spend more time thinking and considering a point that may have normally been dismissed to the dark corners of your mind. Blogging is after all thinking with one's fingers.

Blogging can also foster discussion and communication. If a reader has a similar idea but, say, comes at it from a different view point, they can leave a comment to say as much. This may give the original author further ideas and lead to the progression of research. This is of course what conferences and symposia are all about, meeting like minded individuals and further your thinking. Blogs and on-line communities are a new way of doing this and participating can be of great benefit.
Saying that however, it must surely be apparent from the distinct lack of comments throughout the history of my blog, that there tends not to be much discussion around these parts. So, if I'm not getting the benefits of writing on-line and publishing my thoughts, why bother? Surely by just writing a private journal I could still excise my thoughts and exercise my mind? However, I have never been good at keeping a diary, and sometimes I'm not even that great with the blog. However, the fact that it IS on-line, and there ARE people reading it, is the motivation to continue. Because I know there are people reading, and I haven't posted for a little while, I know I must post, and
invariably I do.
So, in conclusion, to sum up, I think what I am trying to say is that blogging has been a good thing for me to do, and it is its own motivation. I think. Any thoughts...?

2005-11-14T20:18:00.000Z

Here's Looking At You

Do you have a web counter? Do you check it regularly? Certainly in the early days of the internet, the page count was a form of vanity...your first web page...your first hit (was you)...your first ten hits (all you)...and so on. Well these days, web trackers can tell you so much more. Mine (formerly NedStat) can tell you where a reader came from, what browser they used, what they had for breakfast...

Statistics also tell you how readers found you - what link, if any, they followed to arrive at your site. I always look at this, not to necessarily see how many people are linking to me, but to see who they are, and what they say. This isn't vanity, more a case of my being interested in other people's interest in me.

Turns out...I've been caught red-handed.

Of course, I think this behaviour is essential to the community spirit of the blogosphere. Some of the work I referenced in my thesis (see Lilia Efimova) concerns the social network aspect of blogs, and I feel that is something very important in the academic use of blogs.

As the post that revealed by guilty secret says, there is interesting stuff you can learn. By reading what people are saying about my work, I can be involved in any discussion that arises. This then may give me ideas about my work or allow me to help other people with theirs. If people only ever read blogs, they would be useless as a form of communication...we would lose all the interactivity with which computers provide us.

I could write more about the nature of communication, and facilitation therein of blogging, but I'll save that for now. If this area interests you, why not post a comment and start a conversation.

2005-11-10T18:44:00.000Z

We've Set the Date

So it's been a sparse patch I know. I've been taking it easy on the Blog research front for the last month or so. I've been concentrating on job work (you know, the kind that pays you) and trying to figure out how to get us to Australia (things are happening, I'll post more about that later).

It is now time however to look back at the thesis and start thinking blogs again. Why? Well we've set a date for my viva, my thesis defense. This is the bit where I sit down with my examiners and we discuss my work. At the end of what could be between 1 and several hours, they talk and make their recommendations. There are various levels these can take from minor corrections, 1 or 3 month's corrections, all the way up to full resubmission. Obviously we don't want to even consider that last one as a possibility...shudder.

I'm fairly confident that my thesis was good enough, though as I've looked back at it briefly, I have identified a few mistakes. And there is a small extension to the work I've done since that I would like to include. So the plan now is to carefully look over my thesis, make sure after my break that I know it inside and out. I want to identify any errors or areas of improvement that I can before I meet with the markers, so I can be prepared for anything they might want me to look at.

I think I'm very lucky in that my markers are both very well respected academics. My internal examiner is Keith Stenning, a leading cognitive scientist whose main interests lie in human reasoning and communication.

My external is Jean-Marc Dewaele of Birbeck College London, co-author of the F-measure paper I based some of my work on, who studies in the "interdisciplnary field of applied linguistics, second language acquisition and production, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology and bilingualism."
I'm sure at the time I'll be nervous, but at the moment I'm certainly very much looking forward to it. The next date for your diaries...Friday the 9th of December, at 2pm.

2005-10-27T13:55:00.000+01:00

Abstract

This thesis describes a linguistic investigation of individual differences in online personal diaries, or `blogs.' There is substantial evidence of gender differences in language (Lakoff, 1975), and to a lesser extent linguistic projection of personality (Pennebaker & King, 1999). Recent work has investigated these latter differences in the area of computer-mediated communication (CMC), specifically e-mail (Gill, 2004).

This thesis employs a number of analytic techniques, both top-down (dictionary-based) and bottom-up (data-driven), in order to explore personality and gender differences in the language of blogs. A corpus was constructed by asking authors to submit a month of text and complete a sociobiographic questionnaire. The corpus consists of over 400,000 words and five-factor personality data (Buchanan, 2001) for 71 subjects.

The thesis begins by framing blogs in the context of other genres, both CMC and traditional, in order to show the distinctiveness of the genre. Top-down content analysis techniques are then employed to investigate the relationship between personality and linguistic features. A number of features correlate with each trait, but upon regression, very little variance is explained.

Bottom-up techniques are more successful. The corpus was stratified into high, low and neutral personality groups to identify distinctive collocations for each. Returning to the raw personality scores, it becomes clear that even a small amount of n-gram context helps account for much more variance in personality. A measure of contextuality/formality (Heylighen & Dewaele, 2002) shows that authors considered high in Agreeableness pay more attention to differences between their extra-linguistic context and that of their audience.

Attention then turns to gender, where the same methods are applied to investigate gender differences in language. A number of previous findings are confirmed in the blog corpus. In addition, women are found to write more in their blogs than men. More generally, using the British National Corpus, it is shown that men are more formal, except in the most formal of genres (academic writing) where there is no difference.

The study concludes by confirming that both gender and personality are projected by language in blogs; furthermore, approaches which take the context of language features into account can be used to detect more variation than those which do not.

2005-10-27T13:52:00.000+01:00

It's Like Riding a Bike

Yes, I am still here, but I've been writing again. I'm not yet updating my thesis...though it pains me to admit that I have in fact noticed small errors in it. I am making note of these in preparation for my viva.

No, the last week or so, along with working for pay, I have been writing a small paper for a weblog symposium I hope to attend. The deadline is tomorrow so I've been a little preoccupied. It was originally too close to my submission date for me to prepare anything, but a colleague pointed out that they had extended it, so I can have a good go.

There has also been some interest in my thesis. Of course, I can't expect people to download a 300 page thesis to find out what it is about, so I've added the abstract to the introduction page, and I'm going to post it here for all to see.

2005-10-11T16:57:00.000+01:00

The Language of Weblogs: A study of genre and individual differences

That's right, it's thesis time. I'm sure that after all the wait, reading about my progess, reading that I'd submitted, it was some what of an anticlimax not to get to see the finished product. My apologies. I had meant to prepare some posts on the content, summarise my results for you, make it more digestible. However, until such time as I manage this, I present for your reading pleasure... my thesis.

2005-10-05T13:07:00.000+01:00

It's Been One Week

It's been a week now since I submitted my thesis and I thought I really ought to post so that people know I'm still here. Indeed, with the viva to come, I will still be working on things bloggish. In fact, it would be nice to continue beyond that. What I'd like to find is someone interested in individual differences and language, possibly in blogging, with an aim to putting together a research proposal for further work. If there is anyone out there interested in working in this field, wherever you may be in the world, drop me a mail, I would love to hear from you.

So, the first observation I can make is that the intense diligence that comes with the final months of the PhD doesn't seem to stop. On Wednesday I submitted after 4 years work and certainly the last 10 months very hard work. I deserved a couple of days of. However, every time I catch myself doing nothing in front of the TV, I feel guilty for not working. I shouldn't be having so much relaxation I have a thesis to finish. No wait, I already did. My wife is the same, she keeps thinking she needs to send me back to work, but she really doesn't.

Still, despite the guilt, I did manage to have a relaxing few days. Obviously I am back now...gotta earn a crust...but it really does feel good to be done, at least for now. I can now spend time with my wife in the evenings and weekends. I can enjoy all the things we cut back on so I could work more...TV, games, fun...I highly recommend finishing the all Postgrad students :D

2005-09-28T16:01:00.000+01:00

It Is Done

At 15:11 today, Wednesday the 28th of September I submitted my doctoral thesis.

go me!

2005-09-28T08:53:00.000+01:00

The Day Today

I slept last night.

I know that's not normally worthy of posting about, but this is now my third thesis, and this is the first time I've slept the day before I submit. That's how on top of things I've been this time around. Just the last final checks to make...then printing...binding...submitting...so close......

2005-09-26T15:37:00.000+01:00

Two Minute Warning

Ok, so it's more like two days, but this is it: the final Final FINAL push. I'm really getting near the end now and although there is plenty to do I'm feeling really good about it. I submit on Wednesday, but I'm not panicking, I'm not worried...its gone well so far and it continues to go well. I am very proud of my work in these past months. I'm very impressed with how my thesis is coming out. A good page count, good word count, plenty of tables and graphs...lovely.

2005-09-19T12:34:00.000+01:00

Women Blog More

I've been promising some sort of discussion of results for so long, so here you are: women blog more than men.

Now, you can claim you already knew that all you like, the point of much research is to scientifically prove what has already been observed, and I feel I've done that. Here's a sneak preview of a section of my thesis:
Diaries are most predominantly kept by females (Thompson, 1982; Burt, 1994) and it has previously been suggested that the majority of bloggers are teenage girls (Orlowski, 2003). A previous study (Herring et al., 2004) found that while each gender accounts for about half of all weblogs, blogs are in fact dominated by females of teen age and preferred by females in general.
Note the distinction between ALL weblogs, and purely personal blogs. My study is just of the latter, and indeed I am only concerend with post that could be described as personal. I have therefore excluded all "Which X are you" quizzes, all Friday Fives, no song lyrics, nothing except for bloggers personal lives, thoughts, and opinions.

Indeed I have found that two thirds of my subjects are female. Not only that, but examining one whole month of every subjects blog has revealed a number of differences, presented here in easy sound bite form:
Women write more than men (statistically significant)

Women write more personal posts than men (statistically significant)

Women write longer personal posts than men

And you can quote me on that. (if you are interested in more specific details, or references, drop me a mail.)

2005-09-16T14:26:00.000+01:00

Why Do YOU Blog

Well, I guess I don't need to make excuses for not posting...I have less than two weeks left and I am very busy. I worked from home yesterday ... which I know for many people is just an excuse to slack off ... and I got so much done. Not having high-speed internet access is so less distracting. No emails to reply to, no news to check up on, etc.

It really is very tiring. I'm working more each day, seeing my wife for less...that's the hardest part. Even though we are technically in the same place...I miss her...I know it's only for a couple more weeks though.

Writing is going well. I'm writing, revising, rechecking things, all those last minute tasks for a thesis. I haven't actually put it all together yet. I know it's going to look good and be a whole lot of pages, so I'm saving it for when I really need a boost.

...

In other news, it has been brought to my attention (thanks CT) that there is a recently completed Masters project by a girl at Northwestern University on why people blog.

I'm very sad to say that I don't really have time to read such an impressive looking piece of work at the moment (although I may always slip in its first citation) but it certainly looks interesting.

Of most interest to me are the gender differences:
Men claim higher approval of information motivation while women endorse self-documentation, self-expression, and passing time more.
As you know (or may not) part of my thesis is gender differences in the language of blogs. It would be interesting to see how motivation differences are reflected in language. So far I have found a number of traditional gender differences, but maybe motivation can explain others. What was that link again?

2005-09-09T09:46:00.000+01:00

Writing to reach you

So today I figured I would let you all know how the writing is going. hopefully over the weekend I can get something down regarding some results, because I know that's really what you want to read. (If there is anything specific you want to know, you can always ask.)

So it seems to be going really well. I have various sections evolving together, I'm making changes, restructuring, re-writing, editing, adding, creating, tabling...you really can see the thesis so much better the more of it you get done. I beleive they call it taking shape.

My office mate Continuity Boy says that he doesn't mind writing, but really doesn't like revising. I'm not too good with the writing, with it taking time for any words to hit the page, but when I revise things they are much more polished and I'm much happier with them.

I wish I knew that sooner. I never used to read over things at school or as an undergraduate. It turns out, the small amount of time you spend looking over something can not only correct many mistakes, but make the work a whole lot better.

As an example, let me read over this post...

...wow, certainly a couple of mistakes, a few re-written phrases...much better. Not that you can tell...that's the magic of editing.

One of my main problems is long sentences with excessive use of commas. Both my wife and supervisor have often pointed this out to me. So reading over things I've learned both be sparing with commas and notcie when a sentence can be split in twain.

- or -

Reading over things I've learnt to see when a sentence can be split in two. I've also tried to cut back on my commas.

It doesn't always work I'm sure, and I'm not perfect but I'm trying. In summary then, things are going well.

2005-09-01T20:15:00.000+01:00

It's the Final Countdown

No, I'm not heading for Venus, but I really am in the final stage of my PhD. No really, it's only 4 weeks until I plan to submit. Sometimes it seems so much time, because I'm so on top of everything. Other times, not so much. 4 weeks. It's been 4 years or hard graft, and it'll be over in 4 weeks.
I mean not really over obviously. There'll be a wait, a viva, some bits and pieces to attend to. But still...this is it. This is what I've been building to for so long. Wow.

2005-08-24T16:15:00.000+01:00

Emotional Blogging

"Boys and men don't have time to write very much. Girls are more emotional, more articulate about their feelings. Besides, a lot of boys are busy playing online games."
Apparently, this is why the Chairman of a large Chinese blog hosting company thinks that 60% of their bloggers are female.

I guess 60% is probably average. I've seen figures ranging from 50% to 70% so needless to say there do tend to be more female bloggers than male. Of course it's his reasoning that is most interesting: males are busier, females more emotional.

Now recent studies (ie. mine) have shown that women do tend to be more emotionally expressive in their blogs. I wonder if this truly is the reason for it: that there are more women bloggers because they see it as a way of expressing their emotions, where as since men are less comfortables doing this, it's one less reason to blog. Maybe. Interesting.

2005-08-21T17:53:00.000+01:00

Or Would You Rather Be a Fish

Speaking of finishing up, I've been thinking a lot about the future. What am I going to do with my life? Stay in academia? After all, why only do 21 years of your life institutionalised when you can do so many more? Do I head to industry? Which industry? Do I try to combine the two with an R&D job somewhere?

One aim my wife and I definitely have is to see the world, to live in foreign climbs. One part of the world we would very much love to move to is Australia. We've been searching around, but there doesn't appear to be much research in my field. Australia does a lot with health sciences - which is actually the field of the first Dr Nowson, my aunt.

So if anyone would like to employ a computational linguist, with a good working knowledge of blogs and a background in computer science and artificial intelligence, preferably, but by no means exclusively, in the southern hemisphere, then I am most certainly your man. Please.

2005-08-18T20:14:00.000+01:00

How Long Has This Been Going On

21 years, that's how long. 21 long years. What with them making you go to school for so long, and then university, then back to university, then sticking around for a bit more, I've been in education for 21 years. That's 3/4 of my whole life. The PhD I think seems the longest bit. Not just because it's the most recent, but because throughout school, and even an undergraduate degree, things change all the time. You do different things from year to year. A PhD is pretty much just one great big long project.

It's been a long road, but this rolling stone is picking up speed, heading toward the end. The finish line is in sight. I think I might finally be ready to face the world. Surely I'm qualified by now.

2005-08-17T21:06:00.000+01:00

In the Zone

This week has been a little different to the last couple. When I got back, I had a lot of catching up to do with regards my part-time paid work. Now whilst I may not have caught up entirely, I did a heck of a lot. I could afford to do so much because whilst I wrote at home, one of the few pieces of data work I had left to complete had reached an impasse. Last week however, the impediment that blocked my path was, with work, removed.

So this week I've been getting down with some data, getting my hands dirty on a little coding. It's sad, but coding's great. I actually feel like I'm achieving things. This week is a good week.

2005-08-13T19:13:00.000+01:00

Work in Progress

Obviously your thesis is a work in progress from the day you start until the day you submit, but right now my thesis is really progressing well. Obviously after I got back from the conference trip I had a lot of paid work to catch up on, and that is taking up a lot of my time in the office. Evenings and weekends however find me at my computer at home writing away into the night.
I am actually very impressed with my work rate at the moment. It's lightened up a little this last week as my wife and I have been struck down with colds, but still, I'm getting things done. I've written a number of sections of text for my thesis and passed them onto my supervisors while I continue with others. It really is coming together and starting to take shape - all those encouraging cliches for things going well.
Not long to go now.

2005-07-30T15:15:00.000+01:00

Personality of a Blogger

What interested most people at the conference, was that I had gathered personality information on bloggers. There are various reasons why I cannot say anything for definite from my data: I only had 71 subjects; I have no comparison group. There has been work on the gender and age of bloggers, but I'm not sure anyone has data like mine.

However, before I publicly discuss my findings, I'd like to know people's intuitions. What sort of a person do you think a blogger is? To help you, the data I gathered gives a score on five measures:
Neuroticism
Extraversion
Openness
Agreeableness
Conscientiousness
Do you think bloggers are natural Extraverts? Are they highly conscientious? Which of these traits, if any, do you think reflects the personality of a blogger? And why?

2005-07-30T15:01:00.000+01:00

Conference Report

Well, I'm back from the conference and subsequent Nowson European Vacation in the Swiss Alps, and it was very thoroughly enjoyable. Just what one needs to recharge the batteries before the final big push on the thesis.

For me the conference is as much about getting me out there, as it is my work. I've not always been the most confident person, and I tend not to talk to people at events like this. This time however I knew I had to. And so I did.

I spent most of the two hours of my poster session discussing my work with all the people that read my poster (which I shall endeavour to make available when I'm next in the office). After the disappointment that was our departmental poster session, I was surprised by just how many people were interested in my blogging work. Turns out there were a fair few bloggers among the Cognitive Science crowd - one even took a picture of my poster to stick on their blog apparently.

What most interested people was not what the poster was actually about, although I did have some very informed discussions about formality in blogging. No, what piqued much interest was that I had gathered personality data on bloggers. Everyone had their own theory on what sort of person a blogger is, most relating to Extraversion. Actually, I might make a small survey post about that...see what people think.

Anyway, I managed to confidently talk away to lots of people, and I think it was a very successful session. I had A4 copies of my poster hanging up for people to help themselves to, and despite the paper being on a CD everyone received that morning, a good few were taken. Easier to digest than a whole paper I guess.

Of course, I didn't get to speak to everyone I would have liked. Looking through the schedule, here were a couple of people whose work I had cited in the paper, and I was particularly keen to talk to them. But they weren't there. Likewise one of my first tutors at University, who helped me a lot before he left, was second author on 3 posters. But again, nothing but a blank space, taken over by someone who blatantly didn't follow the poster size guide lines.

So, in summary, it was a god conference, both in terms of boosting my work and myself.

2005-07-18T12:34:00.000+01:00

Contextuality of Blogs, 3 - Individual Differences

In the last post I talked about how a measure of formality/contextuality could be used to tell the difference between different genres. It does this by looking at one aspect of the language they use, namely the parts-of-speech. Here I will talk about the work I've done on looking at individual differences: looking at gender and personality.

There has been a lot of work on gender and language. Perhaps the most well known application is the much linked gender genie, based on the work of Koppel and Argamon. I used the F-measure to see if there was any difference in formality between men and women. Not only was there author gender information for our blogs and emails but the BNC held information for some of its genres. You can see the resulting F-scores below.

In four of the five genres women score significantly lower than men. As we might expect, men take a more formal approach to writing, while women are far more contextual. The exception is academic writing. Here, the almost identical levels of formality suggest that when required, women can adopt a style as formal as that projected by men.

The next investigation concerns the personality of the bloggers in my study. As part of my data gathering, bloggers completed a personality questionnaire that gives scores on 5 factors: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. For an explanation of these traits scroll down this page.

To investigate how formality/contextuality differs by personality, we correlated each trait with the authors' f-scores. The previous work on implicitness in emails leads us to expect high neurotics and extraverts will prefer contextual language. The results of the correlations can be seen in the next table.

The negative score for Extraversion and Neuroticism is as we expected: higher scores on the personality scale, relate to low F-scores and contextual language. Low neurotics and introverts write in a more formal style, but only just. The correlations are actually very low, so the results are far from conclusive.

Conscientiousness has a very low score, meaning there is no correlation at all. Openness and Agreeableness however score much higher correlations, the latter being a statistically significant result. Openness has previously been considered the factor of intellect, and it was theorised that higher scores on the Openness trait would reflect higher levels of formality. Our result show some support for that theory.

More interesting is the novel Agreeableness result, for which we have our own theory. One aspect of Agreeableness is the cooperative and accommodating nature of high scoring individuals. This suggests to us that highly Agreeable bloggers are more aware that there may be little context shared between them and their readers. This results in a much less contextual (more formal) style of writing than low Agreeable bloggers.

This is by no means the end of my work, but it sums up everything that I'm taking to the conference. I've introduced you to the F-measure, shown you that it can show differences in genres, and it can highlight differences between individuals. In the future, I will return to formality/contextuality, as I have discovered a few more interesting things, but I'll leave it here for now.

If you would like more details on this work and the background to it, you can always check out the original paper. If there is anything else you would like to know, if you have any questions or want leave any feedback, then you can always leave a comment here or alternatively drop me a line.

2005-07-14T14:19:00.000+01:00

Contextuality of Blogs, 2 - Blogs as Genre

In the linguistic research community there is a lot made of genre. There are many studies that try to tell the differences between genres. Most studies that examine language, like this one, normally take their language from one or more genres. I chose blogs as my area of study, and so it is interesting to see if blogs can be considered as an individual and unique genre. It would certainly seem intuitive to say that they are at least a cross between diaries and personal homepages.

In a number of interesting papers Herring et al. have investigated, amongst other things, quite what defines a genre. They make a very convincing argument that weblogs can in fact be classed as a genre, placing them on a continuum between static HTML homepages and ever changing newsgroups.

The first analysis I conducted with the f-measure described in the last post was to compare my sample of blogs to samples taken from other genres. I chose a selection from the BNC (a collection of 100 million words of spoken and written English) that included both spoken and written texts, scientific and fiction writing.

I calculated the F-score for every file. The averages for each genre are in the table below. Remember that low scores mean the language is more contextual, while the high scores use more formal language.

As you can see, there are a number of very plausible differences and similarities: on the whole, spoken genres are more contextual than written; professional letters are more formal than personal; university essays are more formal than school essays though they are similar to academic publications. These quite understandable results suggest that our technique, the F-measure, clearly detects an aspect of differing language between genres.

So we turn to our texts, the emails and blogs. Emails are understandably similar to both personal letters and text from a mailing list. Interestingly, blogs are only as formal as school essays. They are however (significantly) more formal, or less contextual, than emails. This is understandable for a number of reasons:
Audience: the emails were written to close friends, but blogs can be read by anybody, which means the author does not know everyone who will read it. They cannot expect the reader to know everything about them.

Space: since the blog author may not know the reader, they know that they may not share knowledge of the same things. They may have to give more descriptions of people, places and activities, than someone writing to a friend.
This part of my study was to show that on at least one aspect of language, blogs differ from other genres, and the F-measure is a useful tool. In the next post, I will talk about how the F-measure can show difference in formality/contextuality between individual authors.

2005-07-13T11:58:00.000+01:00

Contextuality of Blogs, 1 - Some Background

Weblogs are a growing amorphous entity on the internet and are coming increasingly to the attention of academics. The work I am most interested in concerns language, and the web is increasingly being considered as a resource for linguistic study. There has been previous work of computer mediated communication (CMC) formats, but this work most closely follows a study of email.

Previous work on implicitness of language has led Heylighen and Dewaele to develop a linguistic measure of contextuality. It is felt that certain kinds of words require more context than others in order for them to be unambiguously understood.

Consider for example Pronouns. If I were to say, "he loves it" you would not know who he is or what it is. You need more context in order to fully understand: "The President of the United States just bought a new bike. He loves it."

Using this classification, a formula was created that summed relative frequencies of parts-of-speech and results in a single score, the F-measure of a text. A low score means that a text is very contextual, while a high scoring text is termed formal.

I have collected a corpus of blogs (the personal diary kind), along with data about the authors. I have used the F-measure for two investigations.
First, I want to know if the F-measure is any good. So I took a selection of genres from the British National Corpus (BNC) and scored them alongside my blog corpus, and the previous email corpus. This let me see if the genres were plausibly placed along a contextual/formal scale.

Secondly, I am interested in individual difference within the blog corpus. I wanted to know how personality and gender might result in different F-scores.
This is the introduction to the work I am about to present and have published. The results of my work will follow here shortly. For those interested in the full details of the work, you can find a PDF of the paper here

2005-07-12T12:02:00.000+01:00

Coming soon...

As I may have mentioned before, I'm soon to depart for the Cognitive Science Conference, in Stresa, Italy at which I shall be presenting a poster based on the paper I wrote that will be included in the conference proceedings. It shall be a proud day, since this is one of my first proper publications from the blog project. Of course, unlike the good old days when you would get huge books full of papers, everything is now given to you on CD. Which means no excitedly flicking through to find my name in print, which is sad. It also means no carrying around 1000 pages of other people's work as I go about my travels, which is nice.

So, to my point, since my work is finally being published, I feel I can finally publish it here (I've previously discussed the problem of academics posting results on blogs, since many journals accepted work that has not previously been published). So I am going to post a link to the paper, and break it down into a few succinct, interesting and ultimately sound-bite worthy posts. Watch this space...

2005-07-12T09:53:00.000+01:00

Blogademia

The title of this post, as I'm sure you are aware, is also the title of this here blog of mine. As far as I know, blogademia is a word I made up because I was doing an academic study of blogs, which few people were doing in 2003. I've also decided to call academics who are interested in blogging, blogademics, because that makes sense. You can see some in the links section of this blog and on my homepage.

So imagine my surprise when I used Google to search for Blogademia and not all the responses were mine. The cheek of it. Some people were even spelling it blogOdemia.

2005-07-06T16:26:00.000+01:00

We Can Fix It

So I was looking at the Blogger website, when I came across some interesting news. It seems like the spacing problems weren't entirely my fault. A lot of people have been suffering aligment issues since picture blogging was introduced. There was a suggested solution but it made things, well not necessarily better, more like odd in a different way. After fiddling around for a bit and making things worse, I gave up and took out the changes. Everything seems to have returned to normal though which is nice. Here's hoping it stays that way with this post.

I'm working from home again today. I had an extended weekend, working here on Monday in order to avoid the troubles. Currently we are watching hundreds (soon to be thousands) of people in rain gear flow past our windows on the way to the final push concert at Murrayfield stadium.

2005-07-01T11:35:00.000+01:00

Hmmm...

So it's still the same, the date is at the top of the page, while the text has dropped. I don't know quite enough about CSS to see obviously what has gone wrong. I might just need to fiddle a little. I also want to work it so I can more easily layout a post. Like have a POSTTITLE class or something. Any suggestions would be most appreciated.

2005-07-01T11:28:00.000+01:00

Spot the difference

So, my blog here looks different. This is because in preparation for the conference, with great help from my wife I have redesigned my webpages. My old ones looked dated, and they rambled a bit too much. The new design is crisper, and the text is more succinct. As I had always meant to, I decided to align my template here to be the same. I've barely touched my template before, it's pretty old school, so this was a little fiddly. It was especially soworking on a dial-up connection but I managed to get it working. Pretty much. What do you think? You like? The text has moved though, so I need to see where this post appears...

2005-06-23T15:16:00.000+01:00

Counting Down...

...to so many things. Counting down to the conference towards the end of July. Counting down towards the big million which will be happening right on our doorstep (and I really do mean actual doorstep). Most importantly, counting down to my submission deadline.

With that in mind, I'm stepping things up and really getting my head down. I have drawn up action plans. Short term, long term, work, admin, all sorts. It's going to be a very busy few months. My wife is being a big help, encouraging and supporting me, and I appreciate everything she does for me very much. With her help I know I can do it.

One option I have is to make my plan, my timetable public; to write here what it is I am supposed to be doing and when. This will make me accountable. It's one thing to make excuses to yourself about why you haven't completed a certain task but it's another thing to explain to the thousands [sic] of readers you have.

We'll see.

2005-05-23T10:24:00.000+01:00

Right Now...

Discussion of blogs and blogging...BBC Radio Five
Live...it was at least...I think about freedom of speech and blogging...

2005-05-13T14:17:00.000+01:00

360 Day

Well, I was going to blog today, since it's been two weeks since my last, but Blogger doesn't seem to want to let me in. So I shall just write something here and save it for another day.

I've been working on various things since we last spoke. As I'm coming into my final months of PHD, I'm trying to get some final research in. You know, the fnial different approaches to analysing my data and so forth. The final 3 months or show sohuld be purely devoted to writing, so I should get the numbers over with.

Along with little bits and pieces for that, I'm also working on my trip, as detailed in my last post. The deadline for the final draft of the paper for publication is approaching, so I am making a few changes. I'm using my anonymous reviewers comments, and using that to see how i can improve things. The main thrust seems to be that it's not clear what is important, and why I did certain things. Well, in the last week or so I've been learning about some statistics that will help me show that certain things are important. As to the whys I also got some good feedback from my poster, so I think I can improve my structure a little.

Needless to say, soon it will be a publication, which means I can share it with the world. i.e. post about it for you all to read. There are some interesting results in it I can tell you. I leanr a little more about bloggers with ever analysis I perform.

Oh...it seems blogger has let me in. So I can post. Huzzah. Isn't technology simply marvelous.

2005-04-26T10:27:00.000+01:00

L'Italia qui vengo

So, as I was saying on Friday, I have been accepted to attend CogSci 2005 which is being held in late July in Stressa, Italy.

In preparation for the poster I will present there, I have prepared one for our own Informatics Jamboree, a celebration of work in Informatics, though mostly our own. This will be really helpful because it will be a similar situation as I will find myself in at CogSci, and it will be valuable feedback on both my poster, and my subsequent discussion/explanation of it.

I made my poster last week, and it should now be up, awaiting the lunch poster sessions today and tomorrow, and I will be on hand to answer any questions. In preparation for this I'm trying to work out what questions there might be. I guess the most common one would be Why? Why Blogs? Why this measure? Why any of it? What are your goals, what are your aims?

...

So I was writing that yesterday before I went. I needn't have worried.

It seems mostly people go to these things for the free lunch. And if they do read posters, they either just read their friends, or they read those of work similar to theirs. Right now, my work doesn't appear to be that close to anyone's. There were a few people reading the poster, and I was able to discuss a few matters with them. I even got some useful feedback. It just wasn't as much as I had imagined, and I certainly didn't have any tough questions.

On an interesting note, I met a Masters student who also blogs with blogger. I'm considering gathering a list of bloggers within the university, so far I know of at least 4. But maybe I'll only link to academic aspects of their lifes, should they so chose to blogs such things.

I shall of course be back at today's poster session/lunch manning my poster. Hopefully the food will be better.

2005-04-22T15:23:00.000+01:00

A Quickie

So I've been very busy with work, other work and moving, and so I've neglected my blog in recent times. Just like usual. So a veru quick update post, to keep you informed:

The paper I was writing a couple of months back, got accepted to the Conference. I'm off to Italy in July

It was accepted as a poster, and early next week my department is having an internal 'thing' and students can display posters, so I very quickyl cobbled together a poster for that.

My office mate has also started blogging, spread the word of blog:
A blog about my empirical investigation of film perception,
Continuity Boy

2005-04-07T10:58:00.000+01:00

A Couple Weeks at Most

Surely. I really didn't think it had been that long. Well knock me down with a light and fluffy feather. I've just been so busy. I have so many things to do, things to earn money outwith my PhD, that when it comes to blogging, I feel i should better do some of my own work rather than take time to write here. Even though as I said, in the long term this will help, because it is a place to gather my thoughts.

So I'm afraid I don't really have much PhD related to tell. My supervisors wanted to see a plan for the next 6 months, my final 6 months, so I drew up a Gant chart. Which was fun. And I just need the time to get on with it. Having to fund yourself in your final year is a nightmare. Seriously, if there are any PhD students reading this with funding for only 3 years, work as hard as you can to get it all done within the time.

I had also planned on posting plenty of links on blogging things that I have found, but I'm sure they are out of date now. I think I might post them regardless.

First there was the article concerning evolution of language and how Netspeak isn't as bad as people imagine it to be. Then there was the story about a newspaper that has taken seriously to blogging.

Then there was the BBC News programme Click Online that discussed the global impact of blogging. You can both read about it AND watch the programme.

I also found some more sites related to academic blogging, things I can sign up for and get my name out there, but I shall come back to discuss them.

2005-03-16T17:14:00.000Z

A Little Bit of This and That

A couple of little titbits from the blogging world. Firstly, in a link you may need to subscribe to in order to read, The Daily Free Press discusses how:
the Federal Elections Commission will take a stab at defining the blog and whether it is free speech, political speech or a new form of the press.
The idea seems to be the discussion of regulating blogs like other forms of media. The authors warn that regulation should apply to some more than others, but regardless, regulating the internet has so far proved incredibly hard. It's an interesting piece.

In a much more light hearted piece it seems that Nostradamus predicted white male bloggers (from The Blog Herald.)
But yonder on the horizon lurks the peoples of myriad pigmentation and genital presentation, ready to start blohing. Blohing the truth and the lies far and wide.

2005-03-10T11:50:00.000Z

Do Re Me

Hard as it is to believe in this period of link-providing blogosphere-discussing frenzy, I have actually been doing some work on my own. I spent most of last month catching up with other things, and so had nothing to say. Now I'm on top of that, I can just do it at the rate I was before Christmas.

So I've been finishing up some writing, re-drafting some work I did while I was away. It's impressive just how much you can change by reading over your work. I never used to do that, I think I was just too lazy, leaving everything to the last minute, but I've learnt it really helps. Not least because it saves other people time having to point out all the very basic mistakes. I mean, I'm not the worlds greatest writer, and I have an annoying tendency of making really long sentences, with far to many commas, in inappropriate, places.

So I have a nicer section describing my methodology, and I expanded my discussion on weblogs. Mainly, I was adding blurb on academic work on blogs. Turns out, there's a lot more than I thought there was. Mostly people are looking at blogs as a network, social or for knowledge dissemination, but there is some work closer to mine.

I found a couple of really nice resources for academic discussion of weblogs. One is basically an online collection of essays, Into the Blogosphere, and it has some very interesting pieces. Then there's BROG, weblog research on genre, gender, audience, and social networks. They also list papers written by their contributors.

There really is some very interesting stuff out there, and as I sift through it all, taking it in, I shall endeavour to discuss it here.

2005-03-08T13:54:00.000Z

Librarian Dooced

So one of the links I found while googling dooced was to a librarian from New Zealand, bizgirl. You can read her full story, following various links here but to cut a long story short, she posted about the fact that she had taken CD's home and copied them. Read more and you'll see that she had received a series of warning regarding her blog.

People didn't like what was being said about them, and even though it was anonymised, they could still tell it was them. Her colleagues also felt she had pulled a sickie, because she blogged how she had been drinking at a party on the afternoon of the day in question.

It does seem silly to keep blogging things that can get you into trouble when people you work with know about your blog. I guess the feeling is that if you calm down at first, they'll forget about it. But it seems that once people know that you are writing about them, vanity assures they will constantly check. People want to know what you are saying about them.

Hmm...in one of those art/life imitation scenarios, it seems that friend of hers is producing a small play based on her blog. Interesting. She's also up for a bloggie.

2005-03-08T12:57:00.000Z

CNagaiN

I saw something on CNN's TV text service talking once more about bloggers losing their jobs. This prompted me to check out their website for more of the story. It's once more about companies and employees needing to work out some sort of policy on blogging.

What was interesting though, was that the article talks about companies that actively encourage blogging, like Sun Microsystems. Also, from the TV but not the website, I learnt that apparently there is a term for getting fired for blogging - dooced. This comes from the name of the website of one of the early blogging sackees, Heather B. Armstrong. I personally have never come across the term before, but maybe that's because I've only been reading news storys, and not actual blogs. Turns out google it, and there's 16,000 + uses. Wow...lot of bloggers getting themselves into trouble.

Also on CNN, the first blogger has been admitted to the news briefing at the White House.

2005-03-07T17:09:00.000Z

Blogs All Over Again

No blogs aren't over, finished, kaput. Blogs are all over the place for us to read about and watch. Firstly, thanks, bizarrely enough, to the media gossip sheet Gawker I've found yet more on blogs from the Daily Show. Follow the links on Gawker and you'll find the video.

Also, it turns out that blogs are good for your health. It's from two blogging Doctors with an interest in things neurological. As you might expect then, blogs won't make you rich, or help you get fit, it's all about mental stimulation. For the readers and the writers. And not all blogs. It really has to be a good thought provoking mentally challenging blog that really get's you thinking.

2005-03-01T12:52:00.000Z

The Good, The Bad and The Humourous Satire

So once again there has been a round of blog discussion in the media, and I must thank my darling wife greatly for sending me many of the links herein.

First of we have the increasingly common blog causes job loss scenario. It's mainly of interest to me because not only is he apparently the first in the UK to lose his job, but he is a Local Blogger and he got fired from the very Waterstones store I have frequented often. I didn't notice how long ago this happened (January) but in a link that may require subscription it turns out that he was headhunted by Forbidden Planet, which is nice.

As has been discussed many times, this is increasing a a danger of blogging. It is one of the bad side's of blogging. There is a worry that people might have to start policing blogs in some way, companies monitoring their employees personal webspace, in case they say anything bad. There are now also some pieces discussing bloggers' rights.

On the good side, the is the power that bloggers can yield over the mainstream media. There have been many occasions were reports on television or in newspaper have been questioned, and ultimately shown to be inaccurate by the due diligence of the worlds blogging community.

Some people consider however that that may also be a bad thing. Power corrupts, and power in the wrong hands can be a dangerous force. Can bloggers be too reactionary, to quick to condemn, and jump on a misguided bandwagon. By the time the wagon is halfway down the hill, it may be going to fast to stop. Try these articles for more on this.

On a personal basis, you just have to know who to trust. I actually saw blogs discussed on television over the weekend. ABC News anchor Peter Jennings was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, mainly discussing his new special on UFOs. At one point, he made a casual reference to blogs, but they later discussed them in more detail. He admitted that he reads blogs. He said that it takes time to find ones you can trust and believe in, but they can be a very good thing. Vis a vis, they can also be bad.

In fact, looking around the daily show website (in the UK, CNN show a once weekly Daily Show Global Edition, so we don't see all the reports), I found a piece by their very funny correspondent, Stephen Colbert, on "fact" obsessed bloggers. As with much on The Daily Show, it was a satirical piece mock-mocking bloggers for their accurate reporting of facts, and refusal to tow party lines.

So it seems weblogs are still growing in importance, but whether or not they will revolutionise media and politics, or be just a tool of the moment, remains to be seen.

2005-02-21T16:39:00.000Z

Consistency Reigns

Kept that up for oh so long. But can you blame me...I've not really had much worth saying. As I had to really concentrate of writing my conference paper, I had to put my outside work, the work that pays, to the backburner. So since I finished the paper, I've been pretty much working on that to catch up.

It's going pretty well, getting through. Finish my second lot today, and I now have a third block of data to work my way through. Fun fun fun.

I'm also working on my plan of action for the rest of my time. I doubt it'll end end up as an accurate day by day account of the next several months. I'll be happy with a reasonable estimate of the next few months. It'll help me map out all the work I have left to do.

2005-02-09T17:50:00.000Z

Mucking around

Check my hits...masseeev. Ok, so they are all me, but I'm just trying to get my commenting to work. Let me try this...

2005-02-09T16:48:00.000Z

Il Completo

'Tis done. The paper is submitted. And even if I do say so myself, it's a fine quality piece. Certainly one of the best looking pieces of work I have produced in some time. It's all papery and scientific looking. Which is good.

Work is progressing in other areas, with discussions soon to be held with regards to the future. You know, things to do when I'm done.

But speaking of finishing, I don't know if I've mentioned it, but I will be finishing soon. I mean I say soon, but it's still a few month off, and when I say finishing I don't mean "I'm aiming to finish" I mean that I will be finished. I have to submit by the end of September, otherwise my funding body of previous years (though not this one so really who are they to set deadlines) will be upset. So there you go. 7 and a half months to go.

One thing this paper has shown me is what I can really achieve if I knuckle down good. You can make really good progress on quality work if you try. Which is what I shall be endeavouring to do for the next few months. Of course, I still have "work to get paid" things to do, but I shall be just as focussed on them so as not to let them eat too much into my PhDing time.

Of course blogging could be a waste of time, but I'm going to try and use this as a place to focus my thoughts. I'll make sure I update at least once a week, and try for more. We'll see. I'd really like my comments working again, but I don't know why they are not. I guess I should look into other providers, since I know not my details with enetation. It's such a shame I lost all my previous comments though, there were some interesting points in them. If anyone has any ideas leave a com...pfft.

2005-02-08T16:27:00.000Z

El Paperino

So, it seems I have finished my first proper paper. I've been very busy working on it for the last couple of weeks. Putting together the data, getting the words down on paper. My supervisor revised big chunks. I revised a little. We revised a little more. I guess that's the time consuming thing, the constant revisions, getting it just so. You just know that as soon as you submit you are going to think of something else.

Something I came across in recent times, the ACM did a special issue on The Blogosphere. There are some interesting looking pieces in it, though I think you might have to be accessing it from within an academic institution to be able to read them. Sorry.

Anyway, should here about the paper in late April, and I will of course let you know.

2005-01-31T16:19:00.000Z

Go Go Go

So I'm not sure if I mentioned, but I'm currently undertaking to write a conference paper. As most academics will be aware with the summer conference season just around the corner, the New Year submission deadline season is upon us. So I've been working feverishly to pull somethings together.

Ultimately, this is a good thing, because my work rate has been really good these past two weeks, I have made good progress, I will have something written, and I will hopefully get a publication out of it (in conference proceedings). Of course, on the downside, I have been neglecting the work required for my income, and so to make amends, I will have to focus pretty heavily on it for February.

I am of course, with all this progress, put in mind of my recent post concerning publishing results in blogs. I have some more results that are quite interesting, but I don't know if I can share them. Of course, some of my results kind of go against what I was hoping for, but that in itself can be a result. Of course, should I make the conference, then I can certailny let you read the paper from it, as it shall already be published work. What I can say is that I am attempting to put blogs in the context of cross-section of writing styles. Where do blogs sit? Only smarties have the answer.