In my introductory chapter there were several examples where I’d jumped to conclusions without backing them up with data. First my citing about the rise of blog usage from X to Y percent in 18 months was confusing. Was this for the general population? The numbers seemed to high, the study participants had to come from some demographical niche.
Further I had concluded that developers seeking profits wanted as high a user-base as possible. Could it be on some occasions that they wanted a large user-base just for the social benefits it gives (collective intelligence)? I had clearly jumped on a description of the world without any underlying research. Instead I should focus on referencing research on self sufficient user-bases from secondary literature like Jenny Preece (Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Sociability).
When I wrote that innovation was happening because of competition amongst developers I jumped on conclusions again. This can be rewritten by turning it upside down: “When conducting my introductory studies I frequented many social networking sites and my feeling is that lot of innovation is happening in this space”.
Again I make the same mistake when I conclude that one not can create sound navigation systems without using social navigation. I don’t have to say theses things for motivating my research. Be straight, base writing on observations and let the writing reflect reality: “Social navigation have become more important the latest years, it’s more prevalent in mainstream media and is a central term in Web 2.0.” One can quantify media’s use of terms by searching for them in different time intervals (for example the 10 first months of this year and the same period a year ago). Two services for this are ATEKST, a Norwegian media database and Google Trends.
My supervisor also reacted on the fact that I’d written that there were only a handful of research projects on social navigation related to the web. He was thinking on more broader terms and included Web 2.0, social networks into his understanding of social navigation. I focused on navigation only, and therefore had fewer papers to reference. He thought such a tight focus would only be beneficial in my research. This can be solved by writing: “In my literature review I used these methods for searching (keyword, citation) and found X relevant academic articles. In the field of navigation on the web, but not with a focus on sociality there are Y articles. Sociality on the web on the other hand has Z articles.”
It’s quite okay to have an hypothesis, trying to falsify or strengthen it. But one can simply describe phenomenas as one sees fit. This is what separates researchers from journalists.
Lastly we concluded that Second Life probably was to different than other services that I’m about to study. I should focus on 3-4 sites:
- Flickr (since it’s a prime example of folksonomy, interesting tag usage with clustering)
- Facebook (since it’s the fastest growing and innovating social network site, first with api for application developers)
- Amazon (early in using sociality for presenting users with relevant items, and early with trying out new things as tagging, wiki)