The recent discussion of blogs and their democratic characteristics (or lack thereof) prompted by Laura|AMP|#8217;s comments at Apt 11D in response to critiques of her blog study|AMP|#8217;s survey instrument has gotten me thinking about the comments option on blogs yet again. It is a question I have pondered numerous times already, probably ever since I started reading blogs and certainly since I decided to start my own.

For me, the question of whether a site that calls itself a blog has comments option turned on is actually quite directly related to what constitutes a blog in the first place. I realize this is a question that is probably impossible to answer in a way that would satisfy everybody, but it is one still worth asking especially if one is to do research on the topic (as I am doing now) where a definition would be helpful.

One of Laura|AMP|#8217;s concerns is that the blogosphere is not very democratic. That|AMP|#8217;s true (she mentions some reasons and others have discussed this point at length elsewhere as well). However, blogs can have a democratic component: Comments. Why is it that certain bloggers decide to go without comments? And what makes their Web site a blog in that case? (Clearly I am showing my bias here in that I believe comments are an essential part of a blog. That said, I do realize and accept blogs as blogs even when they do not have comments turned on.. but do so mostly because the community has decided to consider them blogs. You know which ones I mean.)

Laura herself does not have comments on her Web site. This makes her blog more undemocratic than many other blogs. The only way someone can comment on an entry posted on a non-commentable blog is by posting an entry on their own blog. This already excludes those numerous readers who do not have blogs of their own, but more importantly, it also leaves the original post untouched by critical response. And that makes blogs less interesting in my view. And certainly less democratic.

Of course, I understand some of the reasons why people may not allow for comments. It can be an extra burden on the blogger. If one doesn|AMP|#8217;t want certain types of material present on a site then one must constantly monitor comments. This can become tedious in the case of blogs that attract a lot of attention and response. But comments can add a very interesting and important component to blogs. Crooked Timber would be quite different without the insightful and witty (although in some cases very frustrating) contributions of our readers. I wouldn|AMP|#8217;t have it any other way (here I only speak for myself and not the entire CT crew, but I suspect many would agree). A reader can always decide to skip reading the comments (which, of course, underscores the fact that commentators do not have the same level of input as the posters), but those who are most engaged with and interested in a post likely do read the responses from other readers. (Perhaps that idea needs to be tested, but I think it|AMP|#8217;s a reasonable assumption.)

I certainly do not mean to glorify comments too much. There are excellent and very valuable blogs that do have comments turned on yet receive little response. That does not mean that they are not being read nor that people do not have reactions to what is said on the blog. It seems to take several thousand readers to produce a few dozen comments so only a few blogs will receive lots of comments. Nonetheless, the issue here is the option to comment.

So bloggers, why no comments? And readers, do you care? (I realize it|AMP|#8217;s a bit problematic to ask that question here, but this is just for discussion, it|AMP|#8217;s obviously not a scientific poll of any sort.)

When I was in Paris I spotted a guy sitting on a corner on the ground just outside a bank with a laptop. It looked pretty random, but then it occured to me that perhaps this was the best location he could find for WiFi signals. Now I see that CTD over at ionarts blogged what he considers a possible |AMP|#8220;techno-geek historical first |AMP|#8230; |AMP|#8216;warboating|AMP|#8217;|AMP|#8221;. He and his brother went out on a fishing boat for signals. Not bad. I|AMP|#8217;m curious, what|AMP|#8217;s the craziest/weirdest thing people have done to find wireless connection?

I was sitting in the St. Louis Amtrak station yesterday (huh, that would be a glorified name for a shack¹) and observing with curiosity people|AMP|#8217;s reaction to a soda machine that was sold out. Given the hot day and my tourist explorations of the morning that left me tired and thirsty, the soda machine was the first thing I looked for upon entry into the waiting room. The two machines I noticed at first were selling snacks and coffee. I couldn|AMP|#8217;t believe that there was no soda machine |AMP|#8211; unfathomable for this type of an establishment in the U.S. |AMP|#8211; so I circled the room. And there it was, of course. The first thing I looked for was to see how much the soda cost. However, instead of a price, I found the words SOLD and OUT flashing. Bummer. But now came the fun part: observing how other people reacted to the sold-out soda machine. At one point I was almost convinced we had a candid camera scenario. It was quite amusing to watch how few people bother to check signs. (This was second in a series that day after having watched just a few minutes earlier a woman in front of me exit |AMP|#8211; or try to do so in any case |AMP|#8211; a building through a door clearly labeled and also taped shut by a sign stating that the door was out of order. After pushing it a few times she noticed the sign at her eye-level letting her know that this was not going to work.)

Most people approached the soda machine with bills or coins in hand and started to feed (or attempted to do so) the money into the machine. The machine seemed to be configured so it would not take bills when empty (good call) and the coins fell through and came out in the coin-return section immediately. These signals did not prompt most people to look for clues about what may be going on. Rather, they continued to attempt feeding the machine with their money. The most interesting case was a young man who walked up to the machine with much confidence and tried to feed a dollar bill into it. Soon enough he noticed the SOLD OUT sign. This did not faze him, however. He decided to try again. You can guess the result: nothing. At that point he walked over to the other two machines with much confidence intent on satisfying his soda needs. His stride made it seem as though by marching with enough confidence those machines would transform themselves into selling sodas. Alas, that|AMP|#8217;s not how it works. Oh, the world is so unfair!

What seems interesting in all this (in addition to the obvious) is that people were ready to buy the soda no matter the price. After all, the SOLD OUT sign was where the price would be displayed. But other than one woman (in addition to me), no one cared to check it before starting to feed their money into the machine. Sure, it may be that all these people go to the St. Louis Amtrak station all the time and are already familiar with the price of a soda, but I doubt that that is the case. People probably have an expectation for how much the soda might cost and are willing to pay in the vicinity of that sum regardless of the specifics. Next up in the candid camera saga is a soda machine that charges $7.50 per bottle. Stay tuned for reactions.

¹ The station is so remote (although downtown) that a woman on her way there stopped her car when seeing me walking toward it to offer to drop me off saying that it was all too dirty and messy for me to have to walk to. Some people are so nice. (No, I did not take her up on it, but did think it was a very kind gesture.)

I saw an off-off-Broadway show yesterday (in reality it was just half a block off Broadway, but this isn’t about geography) called Placebo Sunrise. I can’t fully tell you what it was about, but it was certainly entertaining and different. The stage was not the usual, instead, it extended into the distance in front of the audience as a hotel/resort hallway. There was a lot of great movement with the characters coming in and out of doors and side hallways. The use of the stage was incredible and the actors were great at creating certain ambiance without too many props. I also appreciated the use of dance in this piece. It seemed more like a parody and was acted out in a non-chalant way, but in fact, there was some serious dancing.

So what about The Tipping Point, you ask. Curiously enough, the second half of the play started with a section that sounded extremely familiar. I have now checked and yes, one of the main characters discusses an idea that is also covered at length in The Tipping Point (pp.177-180.). It’s an argument by anthropologist Robin Dunbar about how the size of humans’ brains is related to the complexity of their social circles. The focus is on the size of the networks and their exponential growth depending on how many people you know. (In fact, this is where the 150 rule comes from that I have already discussed earlier in my comments on the book.) I won’t ge into it in detail, Gladwell recommends the following for a good summary: R.I.M. Dunbar. 1992. “Neocortex Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates” Journal of Human Evolution. vol 20 pp.469-493.

I have a feeling someone at Amazon has also read The Tipping Point or at least one of the studies it talks about. I forget which it was (I’ll try to remember to look it up and come back with an update), but I recall Malcolm Gladwell, the author, discussing the ad campaign of a company that managed to significantly increase its sales by adding a little treasure box to its advertisements. (I think it was a mail-order music sales company.) Amazon now has a little treasure box of its own. If you click on it, you get some sale items that are only on sale for sixty minutes. It’s an interesting idea. Unfortunately, that’s about as clever as they got. The recommendations, although seemingly customized based on your prior purchases and interest, have absolutely nothing to do with me whatsoever. I now check them out more for kicks than anything else. In any case, I thought this was an interesting coinkidinky.

Thanks to my commute, I finally have some time to catch up on reading. I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell‘s The Tipping Point. The book is about how social phenomena – from diseases to crime, from popular shoes to popular books – spread across the population.

Gladwell is a great writer. He does a great job of explaining sociological concepts in an interesting and engaging manner. If sociologists could write like this, I think we’d have a better reputation. To be fair, he isn’t writing an academic piece here, on the other hand, he is conveying all sorts of interesting sociological concepts to a very wide audience through his writings. In this book, he covers in some detail all sorts of interesting sociological and psychological studies ranging from why Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues are such hits with children to the effects of little changes in how we visualize things on our opinion formation.

Overall, I don’t know if he really offers a clear argument for the spread of social phenomena as there seem to be so many things that may matter. But the book is nonetheless worth reading just to think about the various factors that may influence why the spread of some phenomena tips at a certain point while other phenomena never diffuse widely.

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I’m back.. I didn’t think I’d be blogless for a whole week, but that’s what conferences, meetings and lots of train rides will do to you.

Starting from today, for the next two months, I will be reporting from New York City, more specifically, Columbia University. I have a summer fellowship with the Social Science Research Council‘s program on Information Technology, International Cooperation and Global Security which is based this year at Columbia.

Last week was the program’s summer institute which brought dozens of interesting people to the program to share their work on IT. It was a very rich meeting with people from all sorts of disciplines, which I think is necessary for making progress in our understanding of IT, its diffusion, its use, its potential consequences and social implications, etc.

There are fourteen fellows who will be here for two months, each of us working on a particular project. I will be spending my time on extending my current methodology for studying people’s online skills to an instrument that allows measuring information technology skills cross-nationally. Stay tuned for updates.

I’ve put up some new pictures. These are of the Passover festivities this March in Cleveland at the Katz’s. I had a wonderful time, I think the mood comes through pretty nicely in the pictures.

(Some of these initial posts will draw on thoughts I’ve posted on my E-LIST earlier. This is such a post based on a comment I made in the March 3, 2002 issues of E-LIST.)

A beautiful picture of the Earth has been circulating online for quite a while now. Understandably, people attach notes about their own observations to this message. I have now received several that include geographical errors. I find this unfortunate. I suspect some of this is due to people forwarding on comments they picked up from others. But why not verify information before passing it on? (Hah, if people who send out virus warning hoaxes could learn that then we’d all have less email clutter!)

In any case, to rectify some of the incorrect comments being made about the map, I have created an image that points arrows to specific European cities (where most of the mistakes seem to be focused and where I am most knowledgable about the landscape). There is much more than the specific location of cities to this map, but it would be great if people could at least get those right.

Hello, welcome to Eszter’s Blog. Finally, coming to you live (well, as live as these things get) from Princesstown, NJ.

A blog or Web log is an online forum usually with one main author/contributor who frequently posts his or her thoughts on just about anything – or a in some cases on the specified topic of the blog (this one is general). For a more detailed introduction to blogs, read Scott Rosenberg’s informative piece on it in Salon. Although he wrote it in 1999, it is still a useful piece as are many of his other writings.

Below in the right hand column, you’ll find a few words on what type of material you are likely to see on E-BLOG and what contents I will not be promoting.

As with my E-LIST, feel free to send me thoughts and suggestions. You can also leave a note right here on E-BLOG by entry. You’ll find people’s comments – and on occasion my response to those comments – by clicking on the Comments link right below an entry. Just to clarify, all the main entries were posted by me. Comments by others are on the separate entry pages.