Online ethnography is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days. As someone who has been exploring and wrestling this issue  in terms of methodology, terminology and practice since late 2003, it is interesting to see researchers attempting to try replicate ethnogrpahy online.

However,  to me, it has become less about doing ethnography via online or remote and more about understanding online as a medium and how it is best suited to serve the researcher's mission. To my way of thinking, the researcher's mission is to understand human experiences and behaviors in the context of a particular question or set of business questions.

Ethnography is one methodology to this end, but it is not the end itself. My take on the question of virtual or remote ethnography has evolved from "how can we use the online medium to do ethnography" to "how can we use the online medium to best serve the mission of qualitative research."  Given that ethnography requires direct observation, it tends to require a live presence, and the efforts to date that I have personally seen to try to use the online medium as a purely observational platform have felt clumsy and unsatisfying. (I haven't seen them all, of course). 

My experience is that while online or remote is not a really good observational medium, it's a tremendous medium for participant self reporting and engagement (see Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc).  While the online medium is weak as a platform observation, it excels at a number of things that in-person struggles with due to the limitations of resources of time and money - and intrusiveness to participants. The confluence of broad band connectivity, social software, rich media  and wireless devices has given us  access to human experiences on a scale and with a reach that is simply mind boggling.  Online is really strong at  sustaining interaction, seeing longitudinal behaviors, and therefore capturing experiences as close as possible to the time that they happen.  And in reality, the things we are most interested in learning about our customers happen when we are not there - during the course of everyday life.

In a sense the Internet, as it does with so many things, has democratized research a bit. In an online study, the people we research are both our subjects and our research assistants who we work with to co-create understanding.  It is this reason that activities that come out of the coaching and psychology world - that put people in position to understand themselves better - are so effective in this medium.

This is what continues to excite me and the rest of the team at Revelation. Every day is day where we are breaking new ground and better understanding  the online medium - its strengths and conventions and how they can best be applied to serve the mission of qualitative market research.