:: netwoman's blog ::

2008: Year in Review

2008 was a bad year for blogging - at least for me - but I've been a good consumer of social media and social networking sites. 2008 might have been a bad year for blogging, but a good year for the social. I think Blogs in general need some revamping, there are just too many types of applications and social networking sites (SNS). My blog isn't satisfying my social media needs. why? I've decided to do my last blog post of what kept me busy in 2008 and some thoughts about the virtual social world.

I listened to a lot of music on my itunes and I looked up a lot of lyrics at lyricsmode.com and info about my music at last.fm. It would be great to have access to info about my playlists and bands and the lyrics of songs I'm listening to in one spot. These two sites need to come together.

I think it was a good year for Slideshare. I posted quite a few slide decks, and looked at a lot of cool presentations. I also looked at diigo - I'm not totally satisfied with delicious for some reason, and have been hunting for a better bookmarking system. I think it would be cool if you could highlight sections of the website that you are looking at and are comment on or blog about it on the spot.

It was a good year for Twitter! Facebook statuses kept folks connected and interested, but Twitter took it one step further. Blogging became micro-blogging; in 140 characters or less, you can tell your friends (or the world) what you're doing, or share news, politics & viewpoints, link to pics and more. Twitter (and the application to update on Facebook as well) led many people to question their public & private profiles, and how much info they want to share (or not) with others. I'd like better Twitter status updates available and better blogger interface: Twitter status updates should have option to post public or to followers only (private). The public ones I would want posted to Blogger blog and private to Facebook (as it can/does now).

Facebook is probably at the top of my list for SNS. I reconnected with many of my high school friends, which was really handy for the 20 year reunion we had this year (eep!) & some of my family members are now on Facebook as well. Both Twitter and Facebook have allowed people to maintain their 'weak' or 'somewhat' close ties much easier, which actually works to strengthen these ties.

I played a lot on my Xbox360. And played a lot of multiplayer in Call of Duty 4. I've played about 100 hours online in team matches and free-for-alls & played through the campaign. I sucked at FPS when I started, but now I can hold my own. I played Gears of War 2,Call of Duty 5, RockBand 2 & Half Life 2 & Guitar Hero World Tour among other games. I also kept up with GamerchiX a lot this year. The membership numbers have jumped to over 6000 women gamers. It's great to see so many women gaming. I'd like to see a direct link from my Xbox Live profile to the GamerchiX forums. I’d like a better and strong tie to the group, more activity on Twitter, Facebook and other SNS.

I spent more time in Second Life in the first half of the year. I taught three courses at Brock University in 2008 in the Dept of Communications, Popular Culture & Film; 'The Information Society', 'Cultural Studies of Virtual Worlds' & 'Digital Cultures: Virtual Worlds, Video Games & Gamers'. In the 'Cultural Studies of Virtual Worlds', half the class was spent in Second Life and half face-to-face. It was a new experience to converge media and teaching spaces, and I think the students enjoyed applying old theories to new artifacts.

I also did a fair bit of research this year. Working with Barry Wellman at the University of Toronto (my thesis supervisor), we're just finishing up a paper about home workers and the experiences of different kinds of workers - full time, part time and over time workers - both at work and in the home. We're also working on a paper right now about the notion of 'closeness' in social networks and how people operationalize the term.

I worked with Pew Internet & American Life Project, and we released a report called "Networked Families", which received a lot of media attention. The report talks about how families use ICTs to stay connected with each other through out their busy lives (among other things).

I spent some time conducting research with the People & Practices Group at Intel in Seattle & Hillsboro this year. The project looked at people's perceptions of privacy both on and offline, and the things they do to protect it (or not). We were also interested in new SNS and the privacy implications of location based SNS. We'll be presenting the findings at conferences in 2009.

I had the pleasure of attending GDCSE'08 - The Third Annual Microsoft Academic Days Conference on Game Development in Computer Science Education. A really fabulous venue for a conference - on board a cruise ship that took us from Miami, to Key West to Cozumel. Great presentations and interesting people to connect with.

I continued my research of Role-Players in EverQuest 2 with Dmitri Williams at the University of Southern California & the The Virtual Worlds Environment Project team. We investigate the experiences of role-players via virtual Ethnography, in-world interviews and survey data collected from Sony Online Entertainment to understand the play patterns of role players, their offline motivations and the social interactions between players. We presented the research at Games, Learning & Society conference in Madison, Wisconsin in July, and at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Copenhagen, Denmark in October. I also presented my findings to the VWE group: "Behind the Avatar: using qualitative methods to understand MMO gamers".

I presented a paper "Women & Gaming: What can social research can tell us about the 'non-traditional' gamer?" at Video Gaming Conference at University of Toronto: Technical, Legal and Social Dimensions, Bell University Labs in May.

I reviewed paper submissions for the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, held in Waikola, Hawaii in January 2008, and I was Track Director of Paper Submissions & Paper reviewer for the Association of Internet Researchers conference.
I also reviewed journal article submissions for Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Information, Communication & Society, New Media & Society, and the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

All in all, it was a busy year academically. Perhaps it is not surprising that I didn't blog a lot (and didn't work on my dissertation much), but I still think that Blogs need some revamping. I had lots to blog about - but just couldn't do it with the interface the way it is now. Will 2009 be different? It's hard to say. I'll continue to think about what to do with the 'old' blogger in light of the new social media & SNS tools out there now.

Happy New Year!

(ps - I had a helluva time publishing this post - sooo many interface issues with Blogger!).

posted by Netwoman @ 11:54 PM