My PhD Blog

Today it is exactly one year since I started “My PhD Blog” and it is time to do a little status update.

I have written 52 blog posts during this one year period. That equals one blog post per week,which I think is acceptable. Especially, considering the fact that I only blog about my activities as a PhD student or subjects related to youth and online social networking.

Here are some other blog stats provided by WordPress:

As for my PhD project, I must admit that this first year of the project period has gone by extremely fast. I am amazed at how much time goes by with non-project related stuff - such as teaching, supervising, reading and answering e-mails, attending meetings and network activities, writing papers and articles, giving talks, attending conferences and PhD courses, giving press interviews and other stuff. All of which are really exciting activities, but only very peripherally related to my project.

When it comes to my project I have been engaged in data collecting. I have conducted two qualitative online questionnaires which altogether generated more than 3000 answers. Moreover, I have been doing different kind of ethnographic studies. I would label it “ethnography” rather than “virtual ethnography”, because some of my data collection take place outside cyberspace. Actually, the more I think about it, I dislike to concept of “virtual ethnography” or “online ethnography”, because I think that online social networking cannot be separated from offline life. That is something I will get back to in a later blog post. Among other things, I am working on a concept I call “nexus ethnography”. But more about that in the new year.

I hope that 2008 will be a productive year and I look forward to blog about my activities.

Happy New Year to all.

After the last couple of weeks of alternately being on holiday, working from home, writing paper etc. I am now back at the office and will be answering my mails and phone on a more regular basis.

Of course, I will also be blogging on a more regular basis - among other things I am about to examine the data I have collected from two online questionnaires on youth and social networking and I will probably be blogging about the results from time to time.

Additionally, this semester will be very busy for me. I have a lot of conferences and courses to attend, lectures to give and I am teaching and supervising 1st semester students at Humanistic Informatics at Aalborg University.