I’d like to introduce Appozitegeist, my new blog where I will write in my official capacity as a founder of Appozite. Appozite is a totally new kind of e-commerce company, focused on bringing shopping into an era of social software and smart recommendations, creating a more relevant and fun experience, both for shoppers and retailers. Appozite is a brand new company, so expect lots of changes and updates in the coming weeks and months as we get things going.

I’ll still be blogging here about my dissertation and my various academic research interests revolving around organizational communication, technology and work. The Appozitegeist blog will explore shopping, style and social issues; it’s bound to be quite different from what I talk about here. I’m very excited about the new company and my role there, so give it a look!

With the release of Roku’s Netflix Player earlier this week, and all the subsequent blogosphere chatter, I thought it might be interesting for me to explore my own relationship with Netflix’s Instant Watching service. Because I can say, completely without hyperbole, this service has changed my life. Well, the entertainment consumption part of my life, anyway, and that’s a really big part.

First, some background. I started using the Instant Watching service as soon as it became available to me. Hayes and I have been Netflix subscribers for several years now, and we got access to the Instant Watching service in March 2007. And since Netflix keeps track of our viewing activity, I can easily see what I’ve watched since - turns out I’ve watched more than 214 hours of instant content in the past 15 months. This is in addition to the DVDs we get in the mail.

Also, I love movies and television. I’m not a huge fan of sitting down and watching two hours of uninterrupted primetime TV; I’m pretty particular about what I like and quite frankly, most television sucks. But when I find something I like, I will watch it over and over and over again. We own literally hundreds of DVDs, and I’ve watched most of these multiple, sometimes even dozens of, times.

Now before you start wondering where I find the time to watch that much stuff, I want to share something about how I watch this content. I really like to have a movie or TV show on while I’m working (and I work from home), but if I’m watching something new or interesting, it tends to be distracting (duh). So my strategy is to put in something I’ve seen before, so I don’t have to pay much attention to it, but I still have something there. Normally I’ll turn on a season of Arrested Development or Futurama, or maybe a movie like Office Space or the Royal Tenebaums, but Netflix has so many other choices. Of course, if I have to concentrate or do serious writing work, then I’ll turn everything off. Also, I have two big widescreen monitors, so I have enough screen real estate to share some with a video.

When the Netflix Instant Watching service was first released to users with my particular subscription type, I was limited to fifteen hours a month of free viewing. I used that up every month. I was very particular about what I would use my time on; I remember thinking, “I shouldn’t rewatch that episode of 30 Rock, because I’ve already seen it a few times already. I should watch something new.” I watched mostly movies during that time. The selection of classic films is great. They also have a lot of independent and documentary films.

Now that I have unlimited viewing, I use it for two main things. One, I’ve found it’s great for watching television shows. I have watched a few of my favorite shows over and over, namely 30 Rock and the early seasons of The Office (both the British and American versions). I actually own these DVDs, but I still will watch them on Netflix when I’m at my computer. I watched the first two seasons of News Radio, and got a surprising amount of enjoyment from John Ritter’s show Hearts Afire. I caught up on missed seasons of shows I like such as Heroes, Weeds and Dexter, saw the premiere episode of Californication, and tried out shows I’d never seen like The Tick, The Tudors, Facts of Life. If I were so inclined, I could even watch season after season of Dr. Who and Saved by the Bell.

In addition, Hayes and I have caught up on all kinds of really excellent campy sci-fi films from the 1940s-1970s. From the classics like Planet of the Apes and Plan 9 From Outer Space to the lesser known, but still wonderful in their own way, movies like Dinosaurs! and Mars Needs Women, it’s been great to have all of these available to us anytime we want. We watched A Boy and His Dog last week. It was highly entertaining, and has possibly the best and worst last line of a movie ever.

I personally don’t see a problem with the “limited” supply of movies offered by the Instant Watching service. There are new movies every day, and the choices are already pretty staggering. There is so much to pick from that it seems like it would be hard to not find something you’d want to watch. If all you ever watch is brand new blockbusters, you will be disappointed, but if that’s all you like, then I might suggest you expand your movie-watching horizons anyway. There are a number of new movies in other genres. And so much good, older stuff to catch up on! Think of all the movies you’ve missed throughout and before your lifetime. This is great for that.

Up to this point, Hayes and I have been simply plugging one of our laptops into the TV when we want to watch something together. The Roku player is going to make that process so much easier. I think entertainment content should be on-demand and always accessible, so I am very excited. DVDs are so 2000; streaming content is the future. I for one welcome our Netflix Instant Watching overlords.

I’m looking for people to interview for round two of my dissertation data collection.

For this round, I would like to talk to people who either a) consider themselves always on (or almost always on), or b) used to be always on but have made a decision to be on less or not at all. I’m most interested in Austinites right now, but can definitely arrange phone interviews if you’re not local.

Interviews are 30-45 minutes (can be longer if you’re up for it). They’re actually pretty fun; I’ll be asking you to talk about your job(s), the kinds of communication technologies you use, and work-life balance. Plus, you’ll be contributing to science, and everyone knows science is cool.

If you’re interested, find me on Twitter or email me - jenn at deeringdavis dot com. Thank you!

Does it seem like the web is trending toward the less anonymous? This is probably one of those questions that can be answered with a “maybe to some extent, but maybe you’re also just paying more attention to it” type answer. So, let’s discuss it a bit.

It does seem like in the early days of the internet, there was lots of talk about the equalizing force of the web, where people could log on and be anyone they wanted to be. They could create completely new identities online and express themselves in ways their physical bodies never let them. You could log into a chat room and be anonymous or at the very least, pseudonymous. This was often encouraged for a variety of reasons - freedom, flexibility, safety, etc…

But now, in the new web age of social networking and interactive media, who you are online is often not that different from who you are in real life. In fact, some of the hottest new applications are all about connecting people in the real world. Take services like Dodgeball and Brightkite, for example. Their sole purpose is to share a user’s physical location with friends. (Sidenote: that happened to me today. I was in a coffee shop, and someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Are you jdeeringdavis?” I was a bit startled, but it turns out this guy lives in the neighborhood and saw that I checked in here on Brightkite. He wasn’t a stalker, just a friendly guy who said hi, got his smoothie and left. I see he’s now swimming at Bull Creek Park.)

Do more people use their real names and actual photos for profiles more now than they used to? I don’t know. But it sure seems like people are more willing to share actual real-life information about themselves online. Maybe we’re more secure, more trusting with the web in general than we used to be. Maybe we’ve come to realize that online social networking and profiles are actually pretty powerful personal public relations tools, and it makes sense to link them to our physical identities.

Or maybe I’m making this all up and nothing has changed. Actual social trends are pretty hard to identify. And to think, I posted all this under my real name. How potentially embarrassing.

I finally got around to reading “Uses of Blogs” today, a book I picked up at the AOIR conference in Brisbane back in September 2006. I should have read this book sooner; it was a relevant and stimulating treatment of blogging.

I found the chapters on blogging in PR and academia most interesting (go figure). A couple weeks ago, I started a sort of apprenticeship with an Austin-based web marketing consultant. So far, I’ve learned a lot about marketing and public relations online. I’m more interested in the PR aspects of this kind of work, but it’s great to learn about the marketing side of things, too. Anyway, I’m coming to realize the importance of good content to a successful marketing and PR effort. Trevor Cook’s chapter about PR emphasizes this point.

In his chapter, Cook also discusses the always on, conversational nature of PR online. Blogs play an important role in the “dialogue” of contemporary public relations by allowing practitioners to interact with publics in a real-time, one-to-one, permanent space. Blogs allow practitioners to create relationships with individuals and not just broadcast dumbed-down messages to mass audiences. Lots of good stuff in that chapter, and I will definitely be coming back to some of these ideas.

The chapters about blogging in academia focused on issues of collaboration and intellectual discourse, transparency and hierarchy. Specifically, Jill Walker’s chapter about blogging inside the ivory tower focuses on issues related to a scholar’s position in the academic hierarchy and her online interactions. Interestingly, Walker thinks grad students are in the best position to blog openly (and under their real names) about both the academic process and the content they study. I don’t disagree with that; I certainly have used this blog for exploring a range of topics, including research ideas, the process of earning a Ph.D., personal interests, etc… It does seem like the various responsibilities of a faculty or administrative position could dampen an individual’s desire to be completely free and open with blog content. As a student, however, I don’t really feel that pressure. I certainly don’t feel like my blog will negatively impact my dissertation process or job prospects. I guess we’ll see about that soon enough…

Overall, this book was a pretty quick read, and some of the chapters were more relevant to me than others. But it got me thinking in different ways about issues I think a lot about already.

Here’s an unoriginal thought: writing a dissertation is hard! It’s not because this paper is conceptually more difficult than other papers I’ve written, and it’s not because my people are expecting so much more from this paper than others. It’s because I’ve got a year stretching out ahead of me (that’s after six months of prospectus writing and first round interviews) and that kind of time starts to make this project seem ginormous.

But it really isn’t that big. It might end up being a few hundred pages, but it’s not like I’m Tolstoy, penning the great Russian novel that weighs in at more than 1,000 pages. So why does it feel so big?

It probably has something to do with the solitary life of a doctoral candidate, at least when it comes to this particular project. The candidate is off in her own little world, left to her own (usually woefully unprepared) defenses to navigate through the process. Sure, she has a committee and colleagues and friends and family to help her through this, but no one really wants to talk in much detail about someone else’s project when they have their own things going on. It’s hard to not have an intellectual companion with whom I can traverse this vast terrain. I would never start a company without an enthusiastic, energizing and motivated business partner, yet that’s basically what happens with a dissertation.

So maybe we should write dissertations in pairs? No, of course not! So it looks like we’re all left to fumble our way through this. It’s been done thousands (millions?) of times before, so it can definitely be done. It’s just a weird feeling to stare at my calendar and think that I have a year (a year!) to write this paper. That seems like so long. It must be quite the paper to take so long to write.