Three years ago today...

...I acted on David Gurteen's and Lilia Efimova's suggestion that opening a weblog might be a good idea.

In those three years,
I learned an awful lot, and am still learning daily from everything you bring to our interaction
I found myself immersed in literally hundreds of new relationships with great and bright people around the globe
I had the good fortune to meet up with scores of those new people in my blogging vicinity, at workshops, conferences, at our home when they visited, as well as at their homes across the continent.
I changed jobs, where my blog helped establish my professional credentials
I now work with 10 fun, bright and exciting colleagues at Proven Partners, where I can follow my passion about knowledge work so much more closely than before
I found in my blog my voice in expressing my passion as well as a critical and likewise passionate audience
I find myself giving presentations, trainings and workshops on social software and knowledge management on a growing number of occasions
I found 7 fun and exciting people with whom me and my partner Elmine established a brand new Institute devoted to the things that I also find in my blogging: creativity, culture and above all collaboration.
I radically changed the way I gather and view information, and the daily routines surrounding that

And almost every day I feel more strongly that it is all only just beginning.

I don't think blogs as such will change the world. I don't think my blog does.
It's people that change the world. And all of you certainly changed mine.

With the simple step of opening up a place at blogspot in 2002 I did not set out to change my life. It was just a new tool to play and experiment with, that Lilia and David pointed me to. And it wasn't blogspot or Movable Type that changed my life in a myriad of little and bigger ways. It was you and me when we started building our relations and conversations that did that, and when we started building on the patterns that emerged.

Tools never change anything. It is people seeing opportunities and grabbing them with those tools that change things. Thank you all, who have read, commented, debated, reflected, worked and connected with me. Thank you for seeing those opportunities for change, grabbing them, and sharing it with me. Thank you.

Here's to the next three years!

Six Apart Supports Videoblogging

Maarten Schenk of Six Apart Europe just alerted me to the fact that Six Apart will start to support videoblogging. A small example is available on Maarten's blog: Blogologie: Videoblog test

This is done in cooperation with VideoEgg. If you have a Typepad account you can go to typepad.videoegg.com to test it out with your Typepad login.

How to Get P2P Social Networking

Washington Post Incorporates Technorati Links

While reading an article in the Washington Post this morning, at first I ignored the boxes to the right that provided additional sources. But then my eyes fell upon the familiar green Technorati logo.

Turns out, the Washington Post links to the weblogs that refer to their articles by incorporating Technorati data. Cool.

[UPDATE] Ah, and it works too. Because I wrote this entry, I showed up on the Washington Post's website. How long before we see spam blogs trying to exploit this? Ads in the Washington Post for pills etc.

Euro OSCON and BarCamp

 

 

Web 2.0: Teenagers using technology

During the Web 2.0 conference last week there was a panel with teenagers, mostly 17. The transcript is here. Now we must be careful to read too much into this as these are 5 kids from the Bay Area and probably are not representative of an entire generation, but these to me are the highlights:

Test driving the new Qumana

I have been using Qumana since over a year. Started using it after Jon Husband drew the concept on a napkin for me during a diner here in Enschede, in the spring of 2004.

Bye Bye Dark Matter

Aether 2.0 seems to be ready for the scrapheap of science. Finally. The concept of Dark Matter always seemed like a 20th century version of Newton's aether to me, and an attempt to make the story fit the observations by employing what Daniel Dennett calls a 'skyhook'. Employing skyhooks means using something fantastic or miraculous, a deus ex machina, to plug a hole in your theory. This as opposed to using 'cranes', meaning using already existing building blocks to create a new layer of insight. Not that I have any deep knowledge of dark matter, or matter for that matter, I am just naturally suspicious of this sort of miracular hypothetical things.

Via Gary L. Murphy of Teledyn I learned that the skyhook explanation that is Dark Matter (which should constitute 90% of the existing mass) may soon become superfluous.  University of Victoria astrophysicists Fred Cooperstock and Steven Tieu have come up with a 'crane'-based model of a pressureless gas of gravitational participants to explain a problem that until now needed Dark Matter to explain.

 The success of Newtonian mechanics in situations like our solar system can be traced to the fact that in this case the planets are basically "test particles", which do not contribute significantly to the overall field. However, in a galaxy this approximation is not a good one - all the rotating matter is also the source of the gravitational field in which everything rotates.
  [astro-ph/0507619] General Relativity Resolves Galactic Rotation Without Exotic Dark Matter

Let's hope that other problems that need the Dark Matter skyhook in their explanation will find themselves fitted out with a brand new crane-based one soon.

BBC goes Slashdot

Ben Metcalfe reports BBC going Slashdot. After already experimenting with tagging (as Lee showed us in Copenhagen, and which you can testdrive at Headshift's BBC mock-up here) the BBC is now opening up their Have Your Say section to a Slashdot-like rating system. This is another step in the BBC's experiments with the opportunities the web gves us in building on the patterns of what we collectively contribute.

The new Have Your Say is not on-line yet, but it will look like this:

Found via Heiko Hebig

Skype 1.4 Release: Steps to Social Networking?

Yesterday saw the release of Skype 1.4.0.78
Apart from some bugfixes, extra language support and improving on the API (important!), Skype makes a small step to adding social networking like features to Skype with this 1.4 release.

The profile page will now show how many people are in your contact list. This can have interesting consequences, as Stuart at SkypeJournal also notes. For those of you who are publicly listed this might be something to opt out of, but I use Skype with a closed list of users, and can only be called by people in my list (though I leave the chat function open). These are people that are part of my social network, and I am happy to share my network with them. Otherwise they would not be in my list in the first place. So for those people I might want to disclose not only the number of contacts (which to me means nothing) but who those contacts are.

That to me would be a better way of sharing my network than with for instance LinkedIn. Not in terms of the information that is shared, but because of where that information resides. With LinkedIn OpenBC and all other YASN's I hand over my information to a third party. What I'd really want is a peer to peer social networking application, as it allows people to control the information at the source (themselves) and share what they like in situations they like. FOAF builds on that, but is only a machine readable format at this stage. Maybe piggybacking on existing peer to peer infrastructure such as Skype is a way to gain traction for a distributed social networking functionality?