I have received funding to begin a Ph.D. which is called PartOfTheWeb.COM. Since a part of this project consists in writing articles on this blog I should of course write something about it here. The project has a set of different purposes each of which I hope to explore in further detail later on. In this post I will try to present the main theoretical discussions (from a very general perspective), which I hope to develop in the next three years.

The name PartOfTheWeb actually derives from a specific site called PartOfTheGame.TV. PartOfTheGame.TV is a website designed in a Web 2.0 environment with videos presented by professional journalists, user generated videos, chatchannels, voting systems and so on. The site is owned by Carlsberg (and run by a media company called In2Media) and its main purpose is to be a platform or a community for football lovers / fans. The idea of the website defies traditional imaginaries of football fan culture. Not only are football fan culture heavily dominated by a tendency to inclusion and exclusion in relation to a specific football club (recent theory has coined the term of the anti-fan to understand the identity related processes involved in this logic) but football culture is also a phenomenon where physical presence is very important. This problem, however, will be of central importance in my Ph.D., but at a more general level the study will discuss the sociology of the internet (or in the age of the internet as some prefer to call it).

In most sociological literature the internet or media in general is understood (if discussed at all) as tools aimed at other purposes. Rarely, they are analyzed as separate social spaces or battlegrounds. Consequently, one of the main purposes of my study is to develop a framework for understanding and analysing the internet as an autonomous social space or structure (taking into account the discussion of the online / offline dichotomy). This can be divided into different tasks:

Firstly there will be a need to discuss and develop a general theoretical framework for conceptualizing virtual spaces. My current work is centred on the work done by Pierre Bourdieu and his study of different social fields. His unique approach is based on a statistical technique called correspondence analysis which I will employ as well. Bourdieu has mapped a wide area of different social fields but there is little clue how to articulate social relations on the internet as a unique social structure, that is, how to conceptualize websites, users, profiles, portals and so on in Bourdieu’s field analytical framework. My first task will be to discuss in which way the field analytical perspective can be applied to social relations on the internet. Hopefully my previous experience with Web Analytics will provide some new insights into the methodological considerations of how to apply these traditional sociological tools in this new virtual environment.

Secondly it will be necessary to the make some reflections on the changing nature of social relations when mediated through the new digital media, notably the internet. Here I will take advantage of the medium theoretical tradition within media studies. This tradition, based on the classical works of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Joshua Meyrowitz, tries to understand the media not as just another tool, but as a fundamental basis of human togetherness and history. In their view human history is deeply influenced by the development of media technologies. As print, radio and television have already made a deep impact on our society so will the new digital media. In my earlier studies on internetdating I showed how some of these changes can be convincingly conceptualized through ideas of postmodern thought. In this study I hope to demonstrate that these ideas can be extended to a more general perspective in relation to online communities.

From this theoretical perspective I will try to understand how it is to be a part of a community on the internet. How does this change the way people relate to each other when comparing online with offline behaviour? And does the absence of physical presence change the intended audience and participators when comparing online fan cultures with offline fan cultures?

As a Web Analytics practitioner I simply have to buy some of my presents online and usually I save some money.

This year, however, I bought at Play.com and everything looked as it should. It was a large internet company shipping from inside the EU (UK). Unfortunately they forgot to write that they actually shipped from the Channel Islands just outside the UK and more importantly, outside the EU.So when the shipment arrived I had to pay the Danish customs authorities for handling toll which actually meant a doubling of prices on each delivery L

So next time you buy online (from inside the EU) be sure to check this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Islands_VAT_loophole

A new study by iPerceptions about online banners has revealed interesting results. ( click here to view the article from iPerceptions )Two conclusions stand out from their research based on self-administered questionnaires (which should make us aware about the fact that results are not gathered by tracking behavior).
The first important conclusion is that users actually do not like video ads. They still prefer the traditional text banner. This is the same conclusion that I have spotted from my own practice analyzing website feedback. Users don’t mind text banners but video banners can easily be annoying.The second important conclusion is that the probability for clicking on a banner ad decreases when income increases. This means that higher income groups (or should it rather be interpreted as users with higher level of experience?) perhaps cannot be reached using banners. Perhaps viral campaigns and Ad Sense is the only road to success in the future?