James' Survey

Livejournal Community-Building Research Questionnaire

This project is for the GNST 301 course at the University of Calgary (History of the Internet). Your answers will be used in both a presentation and a research paper examining the community-building aspect of blog culture. By filling out the form, you consent to the use of what you say in both projects.

This whole process is by no means scientific, but rather meant to gain informal recounts and anecdotes about how your online journal has (or has not) fostered a sense of community, and how (and to what extent) you have come to identify with said community.

Please answer the questions in a couple sentences or more. Please fill this out, and email the finished questionnaire to ********@*******.***

Thanks,
James Keller

First, some Demographics

Full Name: Gary Milner
Age: 26
Gender: Male
Location: Calgary
Occupation: Retail Electronics Manager
How long have you kept an online diary (Livejournal or otherwise): Since Oct.2002 (19 months, 3 days)
Where do you do most of your blogging (home, work, etc): Home

Questions:

How and why did you start using an online journal (or “blog”), and what motivated you to continue using it?
I started a blog because a friend of mine had one. I continued using it because it is a good way to have a website with some dynamic content that can be easily changed. I have had homepages in the past such as: Gary Milner's Super Duper Web Page, but updating it was too much of a pain, and it has remained pretty much static since I started my blog.
Another reason is that I wanted (am wanting still?) to improve my writing and develop my own style.

More specifically, what motivated the creation of a family blog?
Initially I thought that I would have a personal blog, but I didn’t think I could generate enough content, so I invited my brother to add content. He also helped a lot with the initial design. I invited my wife to join to have more people posting. At my brother’s suggestion I invited my Dad because we thought he would have good stories to write about, and then later we invited our Mother. For a while My brother’s girlfriend and her brother were members, but I uninvited them to keep it strictly a Milner family blog.
Early on I realized that posting on a blog would be a lot easier than emailing everyone. It became what BBS's of the late 80’s and early 90’s were supposed to be, a virtual bulletin board where you could leave updates about yourself and have disscussions.

How would you generalize the type of content you typically write in your blog?
I write mainly Gary-torials. I prefer to write content about myself, things that happen to me, my opinions etc. Once in a while I will write about something in the news, but I have been shying away from posting a lot of links to news articles unless I think that they are very interesting. When I do, I try to post some of my own content, possibly an insight that I have from the link.
I do not want to be a news aggregator for people that have the same interests as I do, because other people do it much more effectively than I could. Like fark, slashdot, plastic, and metafilter, as well as a ton of other sites.

What audience, if any, do you consider when writing in your blog?
First, I consider my family who are my most consistent readers. Then I consider my friends who read the blog and other bloggers who frequent milner.blogspot.com and post comments. Now that I am working, I am also considering the management at the electronics retailer where I work.

To what extent, if any, (and why) do your blogging as part of a community?
This question doesn’t make sense. I’m going to answer a different question. Why do you do your blogging as part of a community and to what extent?
Phil Greenspun, creator one of the very oldest internet communities photo.net, wrote on his blog, “an interesting idea every three months; a posting every day”.
I find it to be more interesting to read different voices and share ideas. It is also much easier for there to be at least post a day when there is more than one person writing (more content). The content of my blog is also much more varied. It is more likely that someone will have an interesting thought when there is more than one. Blog gems are few and far between. When you are writing for a community, you are more likely to attempt to write something intelligent or at least interesting if you know that you are likely going to get feed back.

How would you describe that community?
It is mainly my family and friends, there are several people who have surfed in by random chance and stuck around to post comments. I’m also getting around 20 hits a day from people I don’t know and who most likely never return.

In what way, if any, has using your blog changed the way you interact with others (both those who post on your blog alongside you, and those who simply read it)?
The main change that has happened is that now I have a more tense relationship with my brother.
I no longer get complaints about never emailing my family, because they are all updated via the blog, although I don’t use the blog as a replacement for email and find that when people use the blog as a way to replace email, the posts are very boring and somewhat dreadful.
As for people who merely read it, the ones that I know will often ask for updates or for me to elaborate on what happened. I find that a few people have already read the story that I want to tell when I see them.