Paper accepted!

Hooray! I got the word a couple of days ago that our paper on the viewing experiences of the interactive TV quiz show Enigma (Probe) was accepted for the EuroITV 2006 conference in Athens in May. Here's a teaser in advance, i.e. the abstract. I hear the weather in Athens at that time is pleasantly warm so I'm hoping for many participants (hint, the early registration for the conference closes March 15th). The ticket sale for Eurovision Song Contest the weekend before the conference starts in ten minutes, I'll head over here to make sure I get a ticket, pronto!

Entertaining past

I was hunting online java games for kids last night as I'm planning on using them in teaching languages. I found some good ones for this purpose, but I also stumbled upon my absolute favorite one as a child: Boulderdash! I ended up sitting all night hunting down those same diamonds I did 20 years ago out of pure pleasure and enjoyment (thus missing out on last night's goodies of the Olympics). The tactic I used back then to get around the evil butterflies was still crystal clear in my mind, which really fascinates me. Imagine that the ways of getting around in a computer game I employed 20 years ago are still there and that I can still use them to successfully play the game! Although the game is a light version of the one I used to play as a kid I was absolutely thrilled to find it, and although a bit old fashioned, it countered well my other passion at the moment, playing alchemist as a gnome in World of Warcraft.

Runeberg's Day

Today, Finland celebrates the birthday of our national poet J.L. Runeberg, who was born in Jakobstad and studied at the Vaasa Gramar School, and at the University of Åbo (Turku). His poetry, written in Swedish, has attracted great attention around the world.

This day is one of my favorites as I get to wallow in Runeberg's cup cakes, just like he did. There's a recipe in English here, definitely worth the effort! For those of you interested in his poetry, and literate in Swedish, I recommend the Project Runeberg site, where free electronic texts of Nordic books are published. Do check out Runeberg's epic poem Fänrik Ståls Sägner.

Photo associations

Thanks to an observant reader of my blog, pointing to broken links in my blog roll, I’ve spent the evening weeding out links and updating the blog. I rarely use these links myself as I subscribe to the blogs’ rss-feeds so I hereby send a thank you-nod to my helpful reader.

When sorting through the links, I eventually reached the photography site of Esa Wendelin. It’s been a while since I had a look at his wonderful photos so I decided to offer my eyes some visual sweets. And what do I find? He’s chosen one of the dearest places in my heart as the front cover of his 2006 calendar! To all of a sudden be confronted with the beautiful, illuminated dock of the small river of Åbo genuinely made me happy, as it holds an infinite number of memories. I’ve done many interviews there, on the river side, while working as a journalist; the river has defined my city identity as to by which side of it I live and I’ve strolled there at all times of the day in various sets of moods. One of the saddest phone calls I’ve ever received was by the bridge you can see in the picture. The artillery of meanings, associations and significance a single picture can hold never ceases to surprise me.

Organizational blogs are more conversational than web sites

Blogs are a good place to speak candidly with a conversational style (e.g., "invite people to a conversation"), and this conversational style may be an important part of the process of building and maintaining computer-mediated relationships for organizations, conclude Tom Kelleher and Barbara M Miller in their paper “Organizational Blogs and the Human Voice: Relational Strategies and Relational Outcomes", published in the latest issue of Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

Some of the most important findings of their study, where the hypotheses of the potential advantages of organizational blogs over traditional Web sites were tested, are

• blogs were perceived as more conversational than organizational Web sites
• this conversational human voice correlated positively with other previously-identified relationship outcomes. The perceived personal nature of organizational blogs, in this case, is related to relationship indicators.

However, the authors note, "blogs allow people representing organizations to speak candidly, blogs may not be the best venue for "PR" messages intended to talk up an organization's commitment to its public relationships."