Moblogging Jokkmokk 2004

It is about one and a half hour until the big concert starts. It has been a fun couple of days with the Jokkmokk team. One of the goals with the project is to learn things about moblogging, multi-author narrative and social tools.

I think one interesting aspect has been the relation between live or non-live blogging and reflection/linking. The directness of live blogging and the pressure to blog (because after all you are out there and people are waiting for you to publish) make for a diffierent situation than blogging some reflections while sitting at your computer at home or in your office. The live mode is also not really compatible with a lot of linking. And you need quite a few active bloggers to cover an event like this one. It is very useful to have an “outside blogger” who is not (necessarily) onsite who has a more holistic perspective on the blog and can write blog entries and do some (very light) editing if need be (and adjustments – I just deleted 6 out of 7 entries that were sent from Therese’s pda – they were all the same).

We have received comments from many parts of the world but more so from Sweden and the local region than we would probably have thought. Quite a few Jokkmokk people seem to have followed us online. It would have been good to have more bloggers involved in the (potential) discussions. That would have added to the collective narrative.

The experiments with MeetingPage – the blob – have turned out really well. You do get a sense of other people visiting the page and we have had quite a few long discussions about this in MP itself (chat and voice). It might be that some of that talk would have happened in the blog had we not had mp but I am not quite sure. The flock behavior thing really works. The planned meeting with the team Friday evening was not a big success peoplewise though. Maybe the tool is better suited as a more general presence indicator and social space. The chat space is to some extent defined through the blog page – people who meet in the chat space come through the page and in that they share a moment in time and space.

Several people have commented on the audio blogs which seem to have caught many people’s attention – voice descriptions, didgeridoo play, the sound of walking on snow etc. It is also a kind of technology that is very easy to use. For most of the audio blogs we have used a system which makes it possible to create audio blog entries directly from your mobile phone. Stephanie tried to do one while competing in the reindeer race but ran out of prepaid card credit. Too bad! Apart from the sound we have used a rather rich pictorial material and a number of film clips (some of them very large!).

In terms of technology it seems as if the wireless network has worked relative well – even if it has required a lot of time and expertise to set up. And even so it is restricted geographically. This means that in many cases the bloggers have to go to hot spots to actually be able to blog. This is really an important part of the project – making a city (albeit small) is not a totally trivial thing to do. Jokkmokk kommun has been very helpful here. We will try to summarize our experience with different kinds of mobile technology later.

Personally I am also happy about the response that we have recived outside of the blog proper. Several people have contacted through email about their response and ideas in relation to the project. It is clear that the project has sparked quite a few ideas – and we have had quite a few blog readers. We will analyze the statistics carefully at a later stage. And more generally we will do quite a lot of thinking about this afterwards of course. Trying to learn from this experiment. We have many ideas for future projects – more obvious presence in Jokkmokk (or whereever) itself, blogging linked to physical objects, participation through mobile phones, cultural empowering, more though-out preblog (i.e. before the actual events start) etc.

by Patrik