Archive for BloggerView
Publicado em 04.05.2007, por HugoNS, em BloggerView, Blogues, blogs, en, web 2.0
After a small break, this week BloggerView is with Ricardo Bernardo, the author of “zone41” and “NaWeb2: um olhar português“. I had the pleasure to meet Ricardo at Covilhã, at the “2.º Encontro de weblogs“. I think he is one of the more interesting Portuguese bloggers. Please enjoy his answers.
1. When did you start blogging? What were the main reasons that take you start blogging?
Ricardo Bernado (R.B.): I started blogging on the January 2004. The mains reasons were to keep myself updated on technology. Then I started to blog about events or just facts or even personal opinions.
2. What were your reasons to christen your blogs as you did?
R.B.: First I needed to create a domain for several things and as I have a special feeling for the number 41, the blog got christened also as zone41. Since the beginning the only thing that changed together with the templates was the blog description. Currently is titled memory extension, because for many things it really is my memory extension.
3. Do you have any specific goals or objectives you want to achieve with your blog? What are they?
R.B.: No, just continue to express my opinions, talk about some issues important to me.
4. In your opinion, what role could blogs play in the future, for instance at companies or at schools?
R.B.: For the companies a blog could be a way of communication with the costumers. Actually some companies are already using this tool, achieving new markets and pleasing costumers. Anyway there is a long way to get there, for example, the last episodes with DELL. They decide to use ubuntu distro on their new machines by suggestion of their own costumers, who vote that decision on a DELL’s social software website.
5. What do you think will be the future of blogs over the next couple of years?
R.B.: The blogs will continue to be more and more the people voice on the web.
6. How many feeds do you have on your news aggregator? What news aggregator do you use? Why?
R.B.: I have more than 1000 feeds subscribed in different categories. I use google reader or liferea according to the situation. I use the Greader because it is web based and I have there the most important feeds. The liferea I use it just in my notebook and there I have all the feeds.
7. What do you think about RSS? What role do you think RSS can play in future, for instance in the relation between government and citizens?
R.B.: The RSS is a great tool to notify people in an easy way.
8. What do you think is the most important thing happening in the Web, now? Why?
R.B.: Somehow power to the people. The companies can not have the control on what is written about them, and the same for the governments, as it was in the past.
9. Beside blogs, do use other social software, like Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg, LinkedIn, Twitter or any other?
R.B.: I use all those services, and I give a special attention to the Twitter as it is the most recent.
10. Do you think, in the future, we could have pro-bloggers in Portugal?
R.B.: Yes, we already have a few examples. The question is that they are not getting the digits as some pro-bloggers outside Portugal. In the end of last year i was invited for be part of a Portuguese blogs network, TubaraoEsquilo.pt, maybe its a beginning.
Previous BloggerViews:
BloggerView #1: Rui Carmo
BloggerView #2: Nuno Leitão
BloggerView #3: Pedro Custódio
BloggerView #4: Carlos Jorge Andrade
BloggerView #5: Pedro Melo
BloggerView #6: Mónica André
BloggerView #7: André Ribeirinho
BloggerView #8: Beverly Trayner
BloggerView #9: Jose Luis Orihuela
BloggerView #10: Laurent Haug
BloggerView #11: Martin Roell
BloggerView #12: Stowe Boyd
BloggerView #13: Stephanie Booth
BloggerView #14: Dannie Jost
BloggerView #15: Suw Charman
BloggerView #16: Euan Semple
BloggerView #17: Tara Hunt
BloggerView #18: Henriette Weber Andersen
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Publicado em 15.03.2007, por HugoNS, em BloggerView, en, web 2.0
This week BloggerView is with Henriette Weber Andersen, the author of the blog “Web avant-garde“, which is available at http://henrietteweber.com/. She is a very funny danish girl, that I have the pleasure to met, at LiFT06. After that, I have been with her at SHiFT and again in Genebra, this year, at LIFT07. I hope you enjoy her answers, as I did, specially the 8th and the 10th.
1. When did you start blogging? What were the main reasons that take you start blogging?
Henriette Weber Andersen (H.W.A.): I started blogging in june 2005 - the main reason was that I was building a social app which never happened - at least not in the format it used to be.
2. What were your reasons to christen your blogs as you did?
H.W.A.: I am probably the best person at being myself. I wanted it to be extremely “me” as noisy and provocative that I can be, but also as funny and gentle. I first named it “only the real is unreal” which is a song by tracy bonham that I have always addressed, but later i renamed it to “web avant-garde” - because I believe that the avant-garde period of the web is where we are right now
3. Do you have any specific goals or objectives you want to achieve with your blog? What are they?
H.W.A.: well exibitionism =) no, I want to learn and research and make all these really weird assumptions, but the absolutely main goal and objective is CREATIVITY…
4. In your opinion, what role could blogs play in the future, for instance at companies or at schools?
H.W.A.: I think that blogs could play a big role, especially within social problems in the global society. I love integration blogs and green blogs. blogs makes me feel richer as a person. I think that businesses will take from blogging what they can see is benificial for them, but also keep the “what’s in it for me?” distance that basically is giving me nausea. But hey businesses are businesses, not people and not blogs.
ohh - I believe that mobile social communities is going to have a really big impact on society also - because the process is different and the spontaneous effect is so much bigger.
5. What do you think will be the future of blogs over the next couple of years?
H.W.A.: they get swallowed in the whole web 2.0 thing ( social apps) which they already have been. But they will not stop existing, they will just be a part of the total communication package. I believe that the biggest goal that blogging can achieve is to be evaluated on equal terms as other communication tools.
6. How many feeds do you have on your news aggregator? What news aggregator do you use? Why?
H.W.A.: I have around 200 - i don’t read them though I skim them and comment. the comment part is the most important for me. it should be like that for everybody. I use bloglines - because it’s not crashing like blogbridge. Blogbridge deleted my feeds twice and then I was out of there. I use it because it’s fast and it doesn’t crash that often. It works fine for me..
7. What do you think about RSS? What role do you think RSS can play in future, for instance in the relation between government and citizens?
H.W.A.: I think that RSS is interesting in blogging, but also the way that Jaiku is using rss to show everything you do online is really spot on. RSS makes the online world more efficient and spontanious - I love it..
Between government and citizens I will believe that it would make the information flow better and more interesting… i absolutely hate the boredom of newsletters..
8. What do you think is the most important thing happening in the Web, now? Why?
H.W.A.: I think the ” something is missing” tendency in the transition from web 2.0 to a web independent of the internet is REALLY interesting, and it probably will be for quite a while..
9. Beside blogs, do use other social software, like Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg, LinkedIn, Jaiku or any other?
H.W.A.: Yeah I use all of those, actually I use a lot of social apps… right now I am real hyped over Jaiku and nabaztags…
10. After the blogs and web 2.0, what do you think will be the next tendency?
H.W.A.: the web without the internet. definitely. a more mobile world. see the social communities like jaiku and twitter are already going mobile…
Next week:
Ricardo Bernado (I hope)
Previous BloggerViews:
BloggerView #1: Rui Carmo
BloggerView #2: Nuno Leitão
BloggerView #3: Pedro Custódio
BloggerView #4: Carlos Jorge Andrade
BloggerView #5: Pedro Melo
BloggerView #6: Mónica André
BloggerView #7: André Ribeirinho
BloggerView #8: Beverly Trayner
BloggerView #9: Jose Luis Orihuela
BloggerView #10: Laurent Haug
BloggerView #11: Martin Röll
BloggerView #12: Stowe Boyd
BloggerView #13: Stephanie Booth
BloggerView #14: Dannie Jost
BloggerView #15: Suw Charman
BloggerView #16: Euan Semple
BloggerView #17: Tara Hunt
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Publicado em 01.03.2007, por HugoNS, em BloggerView, Marketing, en, web 2.0
As I promised last week, this week BloggerView is with Tara Hunt, Citizen Agency Co-Founder, author of the blog HorsePigCow (http://www.horsepigcow.com/) and one of the best Internet marketers. Please enjoy her answers.
1. When did you start blogging? What were the main reasons that take you start blogging?
Tara Hunt (T.H.): Um…I think my first blog post was sometime late 2003. Then I took a long break because I didn’t know what to say (and I had no readers, so it felt odd just to wax poetically into thin air). I went back mid-2004 and have blogged pretty regularly ever since. Many of my early archives were deleted when I moved over to Wordpress, though.
I started blogging because, while reading other blogs, I felt I wanted to respond in my own space.
2. What were your reasons to christen your blogs as you did?
T.H.:HorsePigCow is what my Mom used to say when she forgot someone’s name temporarily. It’s totally silly. I had purchased the domain name way back when and when it came time to have a blog, it seemed like a fun, nonsensical name. I also want to remember my roots as a farm girl.
3. Do you have any specific goals or objectives you want to achieve with your blog? What are they?
T.H.:No real objectives…just to be able to look back and see my progress and map my thoughts in the future.
4. In your opinion, what role could blogs play in the future, for instance at companies or at schools?
T.H.:Giving individuals in those organizations a voice. Writing the story of us from various different perspectives.
5. What do you think will be the future of blogs over the next couple of years?
T.H.:They’ll be as common as email.
6. How many feeds do you have on your news aggregator? What news aggregator do you use? Why?
T.H.:I use Bloglines and have over 400 feeds. I’m also over 10,000 posts behind in my reading. I have to ‘weed’.
7. What do you think about RSS? What role do you think RSS can play in future, for instance in the relation between government and citizens?
T.H.:I heart RSS. I prefer the ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ nature of it. I get ultimate choice over what I read and consume. I have no clue whether it could play a role between gov’t and citizens. Sure.
8. What do you think is the most important thing happening in the Web, now? Why?
T.H.:Flattening of power hierarchies. And yes, it’s happening. The big voices are getting drowned out by the myriad of smaller ones. This will, I hope, lead to a general weeding out of crap that we haven’t previously had the chance to avoid (because of limited choice). I also see the further move into nichification. Not stratification, but the ability to express oneself in circles of people engaged in the same passion.
9. Beside blogs, do use other social software, like Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg, LinkedIn, Jaiku or any other?
T.H.:Flickr, Ma.gnolia, LinkedIn, Twitter, 43 Things, Skype, Technorati, Tangler, PBWiki, etc.
10. As we are facing web2.0, shouldn’t we begin to talk about Marketing 2.0, centred on the users, and not on the produts?
T.H.:That’s kind of what I do. That’s the only thing I talk about, really. Maybe I haven’t been clear enough?
Next week:
Henriette Weber Andersen
Previous BloggerViews:
BloggerView #1: Rui Carmo
BloggerView #2: Nuno Leitão
BloggerView #3: Pedro Custódio
BloggerView #4: Carlos Jorge Andrade
BloggerView #5: Pedro Melo
BloggerView #6: Mónica André
BloggerView #7: André Ribeirinho
BloggerView #8: Beverly Trayner
BloggerView #9: Jose Luis Orihuela
BloggerView #10: Laurent Haug
BloggerView #11: Martin Röll
BloggerView #12: Stowe Boyd
BloggerView #13: Stephanie Booth
BloggerView #14: Dannie Jost
BloggerView #15: Suw Charman
BloggerView #16: Euan Semple
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Publicado em 20.02.2007, por HugoNS, em BloggerView, Internet, blogs, en
After a two weeks break, my next BloggerView is with Euan Semple, the author of “The Obvious?“, available at http://theobvious.typepad.com/blog/. Euan Semple, that was one of the speakers of SHiFT, last September, “has four years of unparalleled experience learning how to make the most effective use of blogs, wikis, forums and other social networking tools, in a large corporate environment.” Please enjoy his answers.
1. When did you start blogging? What were the main reasons that take you start blogging?
Euan Semple (E.S.): I started blogging in 2001 and it was really just because I had heard about it, thought it looked interesting and wanted to find out more about it.
2. What were your reasons to christen your blog as you did?
E.S.: I wanted to call it “Stating The Obvious” because it was me overcoming my reticence about stating the obvious but someone had that title already so I shortened it. The question mark was to suggest that it is just me chucking ideas out to see what people make of them.
3. Do you have any specific goals or objectives you want to achieve with your blog? What are they?
E.S.: No, I still don’t, I just like having somewhere to chuck interesting stuff and trigger conversations.
4. In your opinion, what role could blogs play in the future, for instance at companies or at schools?
E.S.: Given that spreading the word about social computing is now how I make my living I am pretty passionate about the potential of blogs in all sorts of environments. They various uses are too many to go into in detail here but suffice to say anywhere where people are engaged in doing something and would benefit from better communication between each other would benefit from blogs - and so that means pretty much anywhere!
I recently wrote a blog post about blogs in education, as a tool for teachers, and I firmly believe that this simple technology has the potential to revolutionise all sorts of bureaucracy burdened activities.
http://theobvious.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/the_madness_of_.html
5. What do you think will be the future of blogs over the next couple of years?
E.S.: They are already becoming much more mainstream and the demand for understanding them in business is clearly increasing. They will probably morph and change into other tools with other names but I believe the basic principle will remain the same.
6. How many feeds do you have on your news aggregator? What news aggregator do you use? Why?
E.S.: I have around 250 and I use Google Reader because I can get to it wherever I have a browser and it works really well.
7. What do you think about RSS? What role do you think RSS can play in future, for instance in the relation between government and citizens?
E.S.: I think RSS is the killer app. It is what makes the increase in communication a benefit and not a burden. Certainly anyone needing to stay across patterns of opinion and comment can do so much more readily than before and this will affect businesses as well as governments.
8. What do you think is the most important thing happening in the Web, now? Why?
E.S.: I think managing identity is getting bigger and will affect more and more people in ways they don’t really yet appreciate. This can be as basic as remembering that Google doesn’t forget. I think it will actually make people more accountable and thoughtful about what they say and why.
9. Beside blogs, do use other social software, like Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg, LinkedIn, Jaiku or any other?
E.S.: Yep -all of the above.
10. What do you think will be the near future of social software inside organizations?
E.S.: Increasingly rosy and lots of work for me!
Next week:
Tara Hunt
Previous BloggerViews:
BloggerView #1: Rui Carmo
BloggerView #2: Nuno Leitão
BloggerView #3: Pedro Custódio
BloggerView #4: Carlos Jorge Andrade
BloggerView #5: Pedro Melo
BloggerView #6: Mónica André
BloggerView #7: André Ribeirinho
BloggerView #8: Beverly Trayner
BloggerView #9: Jose Luis Orihuela
BloggerView #10: Laurent Haug
BloggerView #11: Martin Röll
BloggerView #12 Stowe Boyd
BloggerView #13: Stephanie Booth
BloggerView #14 Dannie Jost
BloggerView #15 Suw Charman
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Publicado em 02.02.2007, por HugoNS, em BloggerView, web 2.0
This week BloggerView is with Suw Charman, the blogger of Strange Attractor and Chocolate and Vodka, who I have the pleasure to meet at SHiFT, last September, where she made a presentation entitled “Protecting your Bits: In Defence of Digital Liberties“. On her own words “Suw Charman is a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall“. Suw is also an important member of the Open Rights Group, a digital rights advocacy group which aims to raise awareness of digital rights issues, to campaign against bad legislation in Britain and the EU, and to support grass roots activism“. I hope you enjoy her answers, as I did, especially n.º 8.
1. When did you start blogging? What were the main reasons that take you start blogging?
Suw Charman (S.C.): I started blogging on Sunday 16 June 2002, but I had a pretty shaky start. I blogged quite enthusiastically for the first two weeks, but that was followed by a long silence punctuated only by a couple of ‘Yes, I’m still here’ posts. It wasn’t until April 2003 that I really settled into a rhythm and started blogging regularly.
My ostensible reason for starting to blog was that I wanted to improve my writing: I had once been a music writer and was thinking about going back into journalism, but felt that my writing skills were a bit rusty. Blogging was a good way to get my confidence back. Looking back, though, there were also a lot of social reasons. I was living on my own and working from home in a town where I knew no one, and blogging gave me a social connection to people whom I felt comfortable
with as my peer group.
2. What were your reasons to christen your blogs as you did?
S.C.: Naming blogs is as hard as naming bands or books, or thinking up a username or IRC nickname. I just thought of the two things I enjoyed the most - chocolate and vodka - and that was that. The strapline - bubbling enthusiasm for $arbitrary_topic - was gifted to me by my friend Richard Eriksson (if memory serves me right!). It just describes my blog perfectly.
Strange Attractor is a term from chaos theory that I rather liked. Simply put, a strange attractor causes patterns to form around it out of the chaos, and I liked that as an analogy for trying to see patterns in chaos of the blogosphere. Of course, now the blog’s about more than that but the name’s still cool.
My portfolio blog’s name seems pretty obvious to me: Blogiculum Vitae. It’s a sort of pun on curriculum vitae: it’s my blogging resumé.
3. Do you have any specific goals or objectives you want to achieve with your blog? What are they?
S.C.: Not Chocolate and Vodka, no. I never have. It’s always been a place for me to just express myself and connect with people.
Of course, with Strange Attractor the story is different. Strange Attractor started off as a blog about blogging in July 2004, and over the years has diversified into a blog about anything vaguely related to social software, the media, or Web 2.0. It was always intended to showcase me as a social software consultant and help raise my profile, and the fact that it was a part of the Corante blogging network was a really useful endorsement.
In January 2006 I invited Kevin Anderson, who was then my boyfriend and is now my fiancé, to blog with me on Strange Attractor. He wrote the BBC’s Blogging Strategy and is now the Guardian’s Blogs Editor, and he revitalised the blog at a time when I was suffering a little burn-out. Both of us see Strange Attractor as a way to bring our ideas to people’s attention and to kick off or participate in conversations about one of our main passions - social media.
The runt of my blogging litter is Blogiculum Vitae, which I started as a way to gather together case studies and other work-related stuff that didn’t fit anywhere else. It’s out of date and needs a lot of TLC, which I hope to give it soon!
4. In your opinion, what role could blogs play in the future, for instance at companies or at schools?
S.C.: Blogs are incredibly versatile, so the question is not ‘what role can they play’, but ‘what problems do you have that a blog could solve?’. Whenever I talk to people who are interested in starting up a blog or wiki, the first thing I do is talk to them about what they do and how they do it. I try to get a feel for where blogs or wikis could be unobtrusively slipped into their working day and how they would help them to achieve more. Social software is not an end in itself, it is a tool to help people achieve their goals. I believe blogs will play a huge role in the future of many businesses, schools, universities - and any other group of people who have some reason to talk to each other.
5. What do you think will be the future of blogs over the next couple of years?
S.C.: We have some significant technological problems to overcome that will otherwise hold back the spread of blogs. Most blogging platforms were built with individual users in mind, and some of the most popular ones simply do not scale. When businesses want to install blogs for their employees, they are not going to want one or two, but hundreds or
thousands. They will also want proper support for integration with standard business systems, and in my experience this is far easier said than done.
Other tools that we are used to using on the web, even things as basic as RSS readers, don’t always function properly in an intranet environment, so much of the shininess we enjoy isn’t available to business users. As more businesses want to use blogs, they are going to find that their plans are defeated by inadequate technology, and that’s going to be an issue.
Despite that, however, I think that we will see a lot more use of blogs and wikis by business, both internally and externally. The blog is going to becomes a common communications tool, a bit like the phone or email. Our challenge is to try to keep our blogger ethics intact - things like honesty, transparency, voice, individuality - and to transfer these ethics to the businesses that use blogs. That way, we might be able to create real positive change and help businesses become, well, nicer.
6. How many feeds do you have on your news aggregator? What news aggregator do you use? Why?
S.C.: I use NetNewsWire, mainly because I like the interface and I’m too lazy to see what else is out there. I like the fact that it caches entries locally so if I’m offline I can still read my feeds - not that that happens too often! I currently have 264 feeds, with 20,957 unread posts. I actually have a folder of about 25 feeds that I read religiously. The rest I should sort through and cull, as I don’t read most of them.
7. What do you think about RSS? What role do you think RSS can play in future, for instance in the relation between government and citizens?
I love RSS! I think it’s a really key tool for making information more readily available. I advise all my clients who regularly publish news or newsletters of any sort to put it all on a blog and let people subscribe to the RSS feed instead. We’re seeing the majority of mainstream media sites, such as The Guardian or the BBC, offering RSS feeds of their headlines, and as home pages such as Netvibes.com become more popular, you’re going to see RSS spread away from the early adopters - us geeks - into the wider population. They won’t necessarily know or care that they’re using RSS, they’ll just be happy that they have an easy way to collate all the information they are interested in.
8. What do you think is the most important thing happening in the Web, now? Why?
S.C.: The democratisation of creation. It’s easier than ever before to be creative, to write and publish, to make and distribute music or video, to take and publish photos, even to make web applications. If you’re in Second Life, you can create your own avatar and have it 3D printed, effectively turning us all into (rudimentary) sculptors without ever having to hold a chisel. This is, I think, going to revolutionise the way that we relate to each other and to the traditional music, movie and publishing industries. Instead of being passive consumers, we’re now all producers, and the media that is most precious to us is the stuff we’ve made, or that records our lives. This is why commercially produced materials are going to have less cultural importance as this revolution matures.
Of course, this huge blossoming of creativity brings its own problems. With so much stuff out there, how will we find the interesting bits? There’s going to be a real need for curation of the web, careful searching and sorting and gathering together of things that have value to the curator. And when I find a curator with taste the same as mine, I’m saved a lot of aimless searching!
9. Beside blogs, do use other social software, like Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg, LinkedIn, Twitter or any other?
S.C.: I love my blogs, but I also use wikis a lot, from MediaWiki to Socialtext, I probably have log-ins to about a dozen or so wikis. Kevin and I recently set up a Del.icio.us account for Strange Attractor, and I’m also a huge fan of Twitter, which I think is just a stroke of genius. It appeals so strongly to me because it’s basically small talk on the web, which is great for me because I work mainly from home and have only the radio and my computer for company. I also use Basecamp, and am in Flickr, LinkedIn, Last.fm and load of other networks that I’ve forgotten about.
10. Do you think that the European governments are beginning to be aware of the digital rights issues? Are they taking any measures to support grass roots activism?
S.C.: There are a lot of digital rights issues that I wish the European government would think more carefully about and show more respect for. It’s an ongoing battle to educate policy makers across Europe, both at a pan-European and national level, about technology. There are lots of organisations across Europe, like the Open Rights Group in the UK which I helped start, that are working to hook up government and experts, and trying to give the policy makers the information they need to make good policy decisions, but it’s hard going. Frequently, the activist’s voice is drowned out by those in industry, because businesses want to ensure that governmental decisions favour them.
I don’t think any government really support grass roots activism, per se, but I do think that some of them are starting to sit up and taken notice. We are entering into meaningful dialogues with MPs and policy makers, and that’s a very positive step forward. It’s also increasingly easy in the UK to contact your representatives in local, national and European government, via TheyWorkForYou.com. That’s a huge help as elected officials tend to be responsive when their constituents contact them.
So, we’re making progress, but there’s a lot still to be done.
Next week: Euan Semple
Previous BloggerViews:
BloggerView #1: Rui Carmo
BloggerView #2: Nuno Leitão
BloggerView #3: Pedro Custódio
BloggerView #4: Carlos Jorge Andrade
BloggerView #5: Pedro Melo
BloggerView #6: Mónica André
BloggerView #7: André Ribeirinho
BloggerView #8: Beverly Trayner
BloggerView #9: Jose Luis Orihuela
BloggerView #10: Laurent Haug
BloggerView #11: Martin Röll
BloggerView #12 Stowe Boyd
BloggerView #13: Stephanie Booth
BloggerView #14 Dannie Jost
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Publicado em 24.01.2007, por HugoNS, em BloggerView
In this week BloggerView, I have the pleasure to have Dannie Jost. Dannie is a “philosopher and part-time poet aka writer and physicist”, who is the author of “uncondition“, “the next - economics of the hidden: the life of a writer who took a few detours along the way” and more recently one of the authors of elements of tensoriana, an community blog. I hope you enjoy Dannie’s answers.
1. When did you start blogging? What were the main reasons that made you start blogging?
Dannie Jost (D.J.): I started blogging in March of 2004 under a pseudonym at BUZZNET. The account is still there with the pictures, however I no longer update it. Soon I found out that blogging on that platform was a pain, so I started an account on blogger some days later, still under a pseudonym. I wrote a whole story there and it was the story of a rather messed up relationship with this one fellow I had bumped into one day in Zurich, but who does live not too far from here. He and I shared a passion for words, but then the rest of the story was one hell of a mess, and to me writing those 60′000 words or so was pure therapy, I needed to get the guy out of my system, and reclaim my life. Eventually I moved the story offline, it is presently being edited and I do hope that I will soon find a publisher for it in book form. I have several blogs running under that pseudonym that I keep on writing as time permits.
I started blogging under my civil name shortly before LIFT06, that is at the end of 2005 with “uncondition” and that was because a good friend of mine who had read all my psudonym babbling started to tell me that I should be writing for a newspaper. Now, I even tried, but I know myself and journalism, and I am not much of a journalist, I like to interpret things, I like to give my opinion, and I like strong language, none of which are desired in journalism. Considering that my firs paid job ever was as a sports journalist for the university paper, well, I had some experience in that, and I know that it is not my thing. That is how “uncondition” was born. However “uncondition” is focused on more or less serious stuff around intellectual assets, leadership, development and what not.I do not always focus it as well as might be desirable, but this is my idea.
I also like to share what is going in my life. At the end of 2005 I started my personal blog “the next” and there the tone is much more personal.
2. Why did you choose to give your name to the blog’s name?
D.J.: “uncondition” has for me the implication of breaking the conditioned thinking that keeps us (me) on the same old tracks, and that leads nowhere. It inspires me to think of matters beyond the conditioned ways that we have been trained to think.
“the next” also has a subtitle “economics of the hidden: the life of a writer who took a few detours along the way” and that subtitle might as well be my autobiography. While “the next” has something to do with the fact that I was preparing to move apartments, I also amused myself with the play on words and the fact that it was the next blog, and that I would most likely never write about what is to come. I wrote a first novel - never published - together with my school friend Cristina Guerreiro now a gynecologist and obstetrician at the Maternidade Afredo da Costa when we were both fourteen, and that is what I really wanted to do all my life. Clearly I got a few distractions along the way, and it has been only in the past four years that I have taken the plunge and started writing my stories.
3. Do you have any specific goals or objectives you want to achieve with your blog? What are they?
D.J.: “uncondition” is still developing and I have not yet found its zone. What I initially wanted to do with it was to write my own column on a weekly basis on subjects that have to do with intellectual assets, intellectual property, and leadership development. I have yet however to find a bridge between the intellectual asset part and the leadership development. The blog is a way of airing out some thoughts and observe what emerges, what conversations and controversies do get started.
“the next” is about personal stuff. Since Aikido is one of the anchors in my life, I often write about Aikido and my experience of it. I also write about what I experience with my friends, what is going on in my life and what not. “the next” is a way the kosher version of some of what I write under pseudonym.
More recently I started the “tensoriana.org” community blog and that you will need to follow the links and read what is there although there is not much there yet. The idea behind “tensoriana” is simple. I contend that business is art. Business as an art form that takes into account sustainability, technology and innovation, and then contributes to the social welfare of the society is the kind of business that I am interested in. In particular, I would like to grow tensoriana to be a community of entrepreneurs willing to contribute not just with ideas on how to make business an art, but also with funds to support youth social work. Oh, yes, I will eventually write a whole lot more of what this is all about.
4. In your opinion, what role could blogs play in the future, for instance at companies or at schools?
D.J.: To me a blog is just an instant electronic publishing tool. I think that it is the greatest revolution since the printing press, and I think that we still have no clue as to what the real role and function of blogs in enterprises and schools is going to be. The next few years are going to be fun while we figure this one out.
5. What do you think will be the future of blogs over the next couple of years?
D.J.: Uhm. I tend to be a bit skeptical when it comes to making future predictions. I know that I can not predict the future. I can at best make a few conjectures as to what developments are plausible. With this in mind, what I am thinking is that blogs and wikis will continue to evolve and borrow from each other. I think that dynamic sites are still nowhere where they could be, and hyperlinkage still needs some good help. Search engines are however the magic wands that we will all need and will be using. Be it a semantic web, or be it a chaotic web, it will be the ability to find information that is going to make or break the internet, and certainly what will shape it development. Remember, this is a new toy, we are still exploring the possibilities.
6. How many feeds do you have on your news aggregator? What news aggregator do you use? Why?
D.J.: I use endo (kula.jp), bloglines and netvibes. I am chaotic when it comes to reading feeds. Sometimes there are weeks when I do not open endo, but then I have a few hundred feeds in there and they are sorted by various scholarly or more fun subjects that I follow. Bloglines is what I use to publish my blogroll on the blogs, but I also use it for the quick checks on the dozen or so blogs that I follow more closely. Usually those are the blogs of people whom I know. I use netvibes for feeds that I look at more often, especially those from my wiki so that I can keep track of what is new.
7. What do you think about RSS? What role do you think RSS can play in future, for instance in the relation between government and citizens?
D.J.: For me RSS is about pull. People are not pushing information on me, I am pulling information from them. I like the idea, it is news and information tailor made to me. The only challenge is to know what to pull. Yes, semantics, context, and that whole good stuff is important.
8. What do you think is the most important thing happening in the Web, now? Why?
D.J.: I feel that I would like to cheat on this question. What did the others say? I am practically drowning in information, and my scope is narrow, so I do not even begin to pretend that I know all that is happening out there on the web. I think that the web is a wonderful piece of information logistics and that the quantum leaps in the technologies powering this infrastructure are still to come.
I think that some serious thinking and more serious action needs to be taken about the legal issues around the web and its technologies (keywords: DRM, IPR, jurisdiction, regulation, standards). Frankly we need new laws, and we need them fast, and we need these laws to be created by the people who understand the technology. I think that the revolution already began anyhow. I never cease to be amazed at the difference in a web site that is old school and the one that is new school. Old school, command and control, makes flashy websites with much of a face, they are colder than marble in a morgue, and as warm as Pluto. New school, social software friendly sites have real faces and real people with real opinions that they can stand to. While the new school is blogging, the old school is predicting that blogging is a fad and dreaming of monopoly.
9. Beside blogs, do use other social software, like Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg, LinkedIn, Twitter or any other?
D.J.: All of them almost. I am quite a fan of 23hq.com, and del.icio.us is for me a working tool. Twitter is amusing, Jaiku in my view has more potential to be useful. I am also reaching a certain saturation point, and I can not be bothered to join something like mySpace although some flesh and blood friends do use it. ClaimID also does not get my attention, Suprglu seems dead on arrival. I am, to my surprise returning to Yahoo Messenger. I like good old word chats with friends and for work, and since Skype showed up I have used it less. I also use Adium. LinkedIn is something that I am starting to use more and more, and am starting to prefer it to Xing.
10. What do you expect from LIFT 2007?
D.J.: Nothing and everything. LIFT 2006 as it was, it changed my life although you may have to read every single word in “the next” to figure that one out. There is something very exciting happening in Geneva, and LIFT is at the center of it. I feel at this point very involved with LIFT, in particular what concerns my own OpenStage “Knowledge Ownership” preparation, I have very high expectations for myself and this is right now just a bit scary. I have been checking out the participants and speakers, and these are all fascinating, with a diversity of opinions and attitudes. LIFT is about the faces, the people, the liveness of the internet. The people do make the difference, without people, there is no web. I look forward to see you in Geneva!
Thanks Dannie.
Previous BloggerViews:
BloggerView #1: Rui Carmo
BloggerView #2: Nuno Leitão
BloggerView #3: Pedro Custódio
BloggerView #4: Carlos Jorge Andrade
BloggerView #5: Pedro Melo
BloggerView #6: Mónica André
BloggerView #7: André Ribeirinho
BloggerView #8: Beverly Trayner
BloggerView #9: Jose Luis Orihuela
BloggerView #10: Laurent Haug
BloggerView #11: Martin Röll
BloggerView #12 Stowe Boyd
BloggerView #13: Stephanie Booth
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Publicado em 17.01.2007, por HugoNS, em BloggerView, en, web 2.0
The bloggerview of this week is Stephanie Booth, the author of Climb to the Stars. Stephanie lives in Lausanne, Switzerland with her cat Bagha. She works as a freelance blogging consultant, and is basically interested in anything that has to do with people and the internet. Please enjoy her answers.
1. When did you start blogging? What were the main reasons that take you start blogging?
Stephanie Booth (S.B.): I started blogging in July 2000, by accident (http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2000/07/13/weblog-open/). I had been seeing “Powered by Blogger” badges on various sites and was curious. I opened my browser, typed “blogger.com” and created an account. I had no understanding of what blogging was at that time or what it could be useful for. Once I had created my account, I slowly started understanding what it did (”oh, this will FTP stuff to my site for me and format it nicely, neat”) and thought I would try adding this new “toy” to my site.
2. What were your reasons to christen your blog as you did?
S.B.: “Climb to the Stars” is actually a name which is a bit older than the blog. S.B.: I came up with it in February 1999, while on exile in my chalet for a week. I wanted some punchy names for e-mail addresses which would fit in with a couple of alternate nicknames I had found for myself (my online world at that time was an Indian chatroom). The character limit for OperaMail, which I was using at the time, was 15 characters, so it had to fit in there.
I came up with two: “QueenOfTheNight” for Rani, and “ClimbToTheStars” for Tara — somehow, the latter stuck.
At first, my blog wasn’t called “Climb to the Stars”, but “Reach for the Stars… or better, start climbing” was a kind of tagline to it (http://old.climbtothestars.org/hist/version2/home.php), and before the weblog occupied the home page of the site, a poem about stars and climbing lived there (http://climbtothestars.org/writing/climbpoem).
When I got my own domain name in January 2001, I had a long think about it, and decided that climbtothestars.org was the best fit. And thus, the name for my weblog was finalised.
3. Do you have any specific goals or objectives you want to achieve with your blog? What are they?
S.B.: My blog is mainly a writing space for me. I’ve always liked writing, my head has always been full of ideas and thoughts, and sticking them in a shared space hopefully sometimes allow other people to benefit from them. I like that it allows me to connect with people. Other than that, I don’t really have any specific goals for it.
4. In your opinion, what role could blogs play in the future, for instance at companies or at schools?
S.B.: I think blogs are a great tool for any situation where there is an advantage in allowing easy unmediated publication and opening the door to dialog.
Blogs are already being used in companies and schools. As an internal communication tool, as an external communication channel, to follow the development of a project, an event, or a learning process. They are a place where snippets of knowledge can easily be stored, disseminated and retrieved.
Of course, all this is not something new that blogs have brought. The main “power” at work here is the internet — and blogs are today one of the most practical ways of publishing stuff and starting conversations.
Maybe one thing that the blog as such brings us is the opportunity for individuals to attract others who share similar interests or thoughts, particularly under the shape of author-blogs (ie, blogs owned by an individual, rather than blogs primarily on a certain topic, or group-blogs). In that way, they are a very powerful networking tool.
5. What do you think will be the future of blogs over the next couple of years?
S.B.: I wouldn’t be surprised if blogs as such disappear, just like the “homepage” disappeared. By saying that, I don’t mean that they are a fad, but rather, that it’s the principles driving them (ease of publication, two-way communication, the efficiency of word-of-mouth multiplied because conversations happen in public) which are important. Blogs are today’s tool for that, but even now, there are other types of sites which are driven by the same principles (think “social software”).
I do think that blogs (or blog-like means of publication) are going to become more and more common and normal.
6. How many feeds do you have on your news aggregator? What news aggregator do you use? Why?
S.B.: I’m not sure how many exactly (I’m offline right now), but probably 40 or so. I’m not a very good blog reader, actually. Every now and again I go on a reading binge, but there are very few bloggers which I follow religiously (and even them are regularly abandoned for weeks at a time).
I use Google Reader because I find the interface pleasant to use, and it has this great “shared items” feature which allows me to create a kind of mashup-like blog of posts I liked.
7. What do you think about RSS? What role do you think RSS can play in future, for instance in the relation between government and citizens?
S.B.: RSS/atom and syndication are a form of hope in the age of information overload. I don’t have any strong opinions or ideas about RSS, apart from the fact that it’s great, and I think that it’s a really important tool for anybody who is interested in what’s happening in the land of blogs and time-driven publication.
8. What do you think is the most important thing happening in the Web, now? Why?
S.B.: The most important thing happening on the web now has been happening for some time now — it’s the web. I mean, it’s the networking, it’s the possibility for “everybody” to have a voice out there, the redistribution of communicating power (which used to lie in the hands of the media, big corporations, professional writers, important politicians…), the chance for each of us to find an audience, whether big or small.
I think that the internet promised us democratisation of public speech. Blogs are the tool which has made the promise true.
9. Beside blogs, do use other social software, like Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg, LinkedIn, Jaiku or any other?
S.B.: Flickr, Del.icio.us, not Digg, LinkedIn, Jaiku, Twitter, Upcoming.org, Last.fm, coComment of course, and probably a bunch of others. I’m really not a fan of Digg-like popularity/rating systems.
10. What do you expect from LIFT 2007?
S.B.: I expect to have a nice time, see old friends and make new ones, discover exciting stuff and listen to thought-provoking talks. Last year, Lift gave me the initial boost that brought me to become a full-time social software/blog consultant. I hope Lift 2007 will lift me too!
Previous BloggerViews:
BloggerView #1: Rui Carmo
BloggerView #2: Nuno Leitão
BloggerView #3: Pedro Custódio
BloggerView #4: Carlos Jorge Andrade
BloggerView #5: Pedro Melo
BloggerView #6: Mónica André
BloggerView #7: André Ribeirinho
BloggerView #8: Beverly Trayner
BloggerView #9: Jose Luis Orihuela
BloggerView #10: Laurent Haug
BloggerView #11: Martin Röll
BloggerView #12 Stowe Boyd
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