Archive for March 4th, 2008

Blogging boosts your social life: research


Via ABC News Online (”Blogging boosts your social life: research“), the findings of a recent research project out of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne has reported that:

“Blogging can help you feel less isolated, more connected to a community and more satisfied with your friendships, both online and face-to-face…”

I have to say I’m always wary of main stream media news sources that generalise the findings of a study into a one-line grab, completely omitting the subtle realities of the quantitative data set in the process.

While this article piqued my interest initially I was left feeling extremely unsatisfied with their shallow account of the research publication. I hope the journal article itself will provide more insight, because I can’t say I read anything that I didn’t already know.

I also find it extremely surprising that the study turned to MySpace for their sample population. This came in the form of an email sent personally to 600 users, requesting their participation and directing them to an online survey. This yielded 134 submissions - with 84 intending to blog and 50 not intending to blog.

As an online environment, MySpace is a network geared more towards casual and fairly shallow interaction via comments and messaging. I wouldn’t exactly call it a staging area for would-be bloggers.

Then again, having just tracked down the journal article itself I note the title is “Distress, Coping, and Blogging: Comparing New MySpace Users by Their Intention to Blog”.

While the content created on MySpace would still qualify as “blogging” in some cases, it should be noted that the caliper and nature of the content is drastically different on other blogging platforms. I would therefore advise against extrapolating the findings of this study in a general way across the entire population of bloggers, as you would likely discover the statistics are different.

Nonetheless, the fact that blogging research of any kind is starting to hit the radar of academia in Australia can only be a good thing.

References:

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

social software 1 Comment

Rumours of GTalk Update


This just in: Chatter is starting to grow that a new version of Google Talk is currently in the works.

Via Google Operating System (”Google Talk, Not Dead After All“):

“14 months ago, when Google added Vista support for its instant messaging client, nobody anticipated a long period with no updates. According to a Google engineer, the desktop client hasn’t been abandoned and we should expect a completely new version of Google Talk. While I couldn’t find when it will be released or the new features, it’s reassuring to hear that Google is still working on GTalk.”

ZDNet notes (”Google Talk desktop client set for an update?“) that the last GTalk update was to add support for Microsoft Vista. There’s been a big fat nothing since then, with all development work since devoted to the web-based client.

I’ve said my piece in this respect before. Let’s hope there’s some truth to the rumours. Google Talk is still my IM preference over most of the rest of the field - including MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, IRC, and the slew of 3rd party tools like Trillian; but it would be nice to see some actual attention from Google again.

Both posts ask for user feedback on what you’d like to see included in the alleged new version. I stick my hand up for AIM integration, group chat. The remaining features (emoticons, Chatback, and ability to embed instances in websites) are nice to have, but I could take them or leave them.

References:

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

web communication 2 Comments