Blog Friends v1 Beta launches tomorrow!

I can't quite believe it but it's true—Blog Friends v1 Public Beta launches tomorrow, after months of preparation and weeks of testing and bug fixing (it's hard to convey to those who haven't experienced it just how fiendishly difficult it is to get a complex web service working properly in Internet Explorer ; ).

I'll be blogging about Blog Friends v1 Beta at The Blog Friends Blog tomorrow, but in the meantime you can find some more annotated screenshots of the app in action on our flickr group.

Looking forward to welcoming y'all to the new Blog Friends tomorrow. (If you don't yet have Blog Friends added to your facebook account, just follow this link.) Oh, and the current Blog Friends service will be out of action for much of tomorrow while Benjie updates the servers—not a trivial task now we have over 18,000 users!

Identity, embodied

It's hard to believe that I was posting up to three times daily on this blog just a few months ago. Since dedicating myself to creating, launching and growing Blog Friends with Jof and Benjie in June this year, my to-do list has been continuously overflowing with design, administrative and business tasks, leaving little room in my schedule let alone my head for "identity" blogging.

That said, the real problem has not been a lack of time—it's been a profound shift of point of view on my part. For three years, I was on the outside looking in on the world of web-enabled business. Sitting on a cloud at 15,000 feet and surveying the landscape stretching out below me became a comfortable habit, and the resulting insights and musings ended up on weaverluke blog.

Not that I wasn't working diligently throughout those three years to realise my "i-together" vision of a world where each individual could explore and express their unique identity in rich community contexts. Far from it: I dedicated much of my spare time and my life savings (and then some), to create with various programmers three prototype applications of that vision, and wrote any number of supporting business plan drafts. Then Facebook's Platform came along, and I realised that there was a great market opportunity for a very specific aspect of the i-together vision—the social blog post sharing and discovery service that is now Blog Friends.

Soon afterwards Jof, Benjie and I launched Blog Friends into the world, rapidly gaining real users with real opinions and preferences. There were suddenly a million things to do by yesterday just to keep the service running, let alone planning and building new service features, iterating the business plan, networking with potential employees, partners and investors, and lastly—but actually most importantly—communicating one-to-one with our wonderful and loyal users.

June, July, August, September, October... The months have sped by and weaverluke blog has languished. It feels rather ironic that I've co-created a service for bloggers and blog readers, yet seem to have lost my own blogging mojo so catastrophically! We also now have a blog for Blog Friends itself that will need tending.

So how could what weaverluke blog has been transition into something that supports and is fed by what my life has become? In other words, what's the common thread (a weaver always needs a thread) that runs through my passions for identity and for Blog Friends?

Considering that question for a moment, I realise that as we adjust the designs for Blog Friends v1 by a pixel here, a shade of blue there, and as we plough through the nitty gritty numbers of the i-together business plan, it is all too easy for me to forget what so excited me about i-together and Blog Friends in the first place.

We are all preciously unique, but we have so much in common too. We thrive when we acknowledge and celebrate both our individuality and our commonalities.

I wanted to create a service that taps into these insights to help people discover and share stuff that really interests them, easily and intuitively. And I really feel that with the forthcoming "v1" release of Blog Friends, we are getting a whole lot closer to that goal.

V1 introduces a full-page feed reader, rich feedback options to tune your topic and author preferences and a whole lot more. Jof, Benjie and I have been grafting away for a couple of months on v1, and we're just days away from launching it into private beta testing now (do let me know, along with your facebook id please, if you'd like an invitation!).

Anyhow, this rambling and anecdotal post has wandered off topic, just like my mind has wandered from the purity and abstraction of "identity" these last months into the challenge of actually making something with and for real people! Because at the end of the day, it's all about relationship, right, this identity stuff? About sharing your passion and dreams with others, and witnessing them in theirs.

Hopefully, I can start to do some more of that on this blog and at the Blog Friends Blog from now on.

Rolling up my sleeves!

It has been a really rewarding experience to blog daily over these last few months. I have certainly deepened my understanding and love of identity in the process, even though it has been an arduous one at times. Mostly, it's just been a lot of fun to shoot off opinions on pretty much any subject that catches my fancy in the name of "identity"! ; )

However, I've come to sense that my focus is now required on a number of larger scale endeavours—a shift from short story to novel form, you might say. Three projects are starting to fill my horizons:

1. My forthcoming collaborative post series on "Startups and identity". I am enjoying some exhilarating brainstorming sessions with my co-conspiritors at the moment, and I need to give these substantial individual posts—and the overall project—some quality thinking and writing time. My poor brain is straining at its limits with this stuff!
   
2. My own startup, a service for pro bloggers. I recently met someone with great experience and knowhow, and who I clicked with really well, who could just help me get this project off the ground big time, after months and years of planning and effort. I think it's time to jump in feet first!
   
3. Identity Society, the research and discussion forum I co-founded. This autumn, the DTI is offering £10 million pounds for research into the impacts of Identity Management (the ID Card etc.) on society, and I believe there is a great opportunity for Identity Society here. Having left this project out to graze somewhat since our launch event, I am now working with co-founder John Madelin and a number of other leading figures in the identity world to take it forwards much more proactively.
   

So, the upshot of all this is that, even when I'm not teaching piano, my working day is going to be fairly comprehensively accounted for by these three projects. Accordingly, the frequency of my blog posts is likely to fall quite a bit for the time being.

Please don't quit on me, though—I'm really excited about the "Startups and identity" project, and you will hopefully find those posts appearing not too infrequently on these virtual pages!

Here's to new adventures... : )

weaverluke blog is 3 today!

Happy birthday, weaverluke blog—I can't quite believe it, but it has indeed been three years today since I posted my first entry about an itinerant Native American spiritual leader called Walking Eagle!

I never did hear from Walking Eagle again—I wonder how he's getting along on his globe-trotting travels? I have certainly learned a whole lot about myself, identity and life in general on my own three year blogging journey.

What will the next three years bring for weaverluke blog, I wonder? I hope that you'll tarry along the winding path with me to find out—and help me avoid some wrong turns along the way, I'm sure!

China abandons blog identity plan

BBC News reports:

The Chinese government is backing down from plans to force millions of Chinese bloggers to register their real names.

There are an estimated 20 million bloggers in the country and the plans announced last year provoked huge protest from Chinese internet users.

At the time, the government said it thought the system would make bloggers more responsible for their behaviour.

But Chinese bloggers condemned the proposal as an attempt by the government to control information.

The situation in China with regards to freedom of expression is more nuanced and complex than the mainstream media would have you believe. This development seems to be a sign that the increasingly economically-focused Chinese government is beginning to recognise that information wants to flow freely in a prosperous modern society.

Snap previews—like 'em or loath em?

As an experiment, I've turned on Snap previews for the links in these posts and in the sidebar too. Roll over a link and you'll see what I mean. Usually, you will see a miniature image of the linked-to page, but for Wikipedia pages, Amazon product pages and various other kinds of sites, you will see specially-formatted summaries of the page's content.

Hopefully this provides a useful timesaving functionality to my readers, but it could, conversely, becoming a bit annoying to have those boxes pop up all the time? Let me know if you have strong feelings one way or the other—I'm happy to turn Snap back off if you all hate it!

The blog as the new resumé

Joshua Porter argues, in concordance with Adam Darowsky, that the blog is the new resumé. It's certainly an interesting perspective on blogging, though blogs can be very, a little or not at all professionally focused. In my case, weaverluke blog functions as my "calling card" for my identity work, but there are other professional hats, those of piano teacher and web entrepreneur, that I don't tend to wear here too often. Which is much the same approach as a good resume takes, I guess—that of communicating a particular persona, rather than one's identity as a whole.

Another identity-related blog

I just discovered Ryan Lanham's blog, Identity Unknown, which is about "mashup, theory and opinion on ecologies, cultures, societies and individuals coping with identity in an Age of Unintended Consequences."

The blog's "topics" page gives a more detailed description of its remit:

What is the tie that binds across this admittedly eclectic blog?

In a word, it’s identity–but that word is vague at best. What I am about here is studying and reporting on the melting I see (that is, theorize) going on in various institutional and organizational forms during the current time of extensive global and technological interaction. My wife hears a lot about melting chocolate…melting shaving foam and the like.

I am also interested in the moral issues this institutional melting raises, particularly for realizing public action. That is, I worry about fading government institutions, proliferating jurisdictions, complex public networks of action, and public-private sorts of partnerships and their inadequacies.

Unlike many public administration scholars, I don’t seek to revitalize old institutions. Rather, I’d like to see them through to transformations that are sustainable and productively dynamic. You might say that I am trying to make sure that no one gets burned in the melting process however it may go.

Structures create borders. So I also worry about border disputes of various sorts such as those between “sectors” and other “imagined” categories. This takes me into conflicts and their resolvers of all sorts. As such, I study nonprofit organizations, social entrepreneurship and a strange type of quasi-organization that eschews identity for action–I call these “post-organizations.” They include forms like community foundations, which is my dissertation topic. These post-organizations operate so as to downplay identity in favor of innovation–a very new concept, I think. I am big on enabling versus solving–I see them as points on a continuum of sorts.

I view innovation as approximately an inverse to social structure. Following actor-network-theory, I refer to the relationships that hold in a given situation for a given person (or an actant or group), as an ontology. That is a key term on this blog. Strong ontologies make innovation difficult. Strong ontologies=structure.

Overall, I think in terms of many co-operational and conflicting ontologies being in play all at the same time. We live in an ontology soup. It can either mesh gently or like a bunch of unsynchronized bits of steel.

In my theory, when an ontology fails to support a situation for the one applying a given version, the person/actant/group who thought they had it all together is thrust into dissonance–a sense of psychological unease. That cognitive dissonance leads to innovations. Innovation is thus the attempt to make ontologies more inclusive to absorb new situations.

Structure works in the opposite way but toward the same end. It prevents dissonance by enacting the same rules over and over again. While very efficient when things are relatively stable, structure doesn’t work very well in a time of uncertainty and interaction. Classic structure, in this sense of the term, is a bureaucracy in a corporation or government. But it is also as much found in the strict religious teachings of a fundamentalist sect. Anything that locks thinking is structure.

Surrounding an ontology are borders of boundary objects–another key term in this blog. A boundary object is something that is contested between ontologies. Thus, any ontological relationship or fact held by a person could be a boundary object with someone else’s ontology in any given situation–that is, everything can be contested by someone. Such contests also cause dissonance and thus also contribute to innovations when the conflicts arise in different situations.

“Strong ontologies,” e.g. orthodox faiths, reiterate certain key ontological boundary objects that underscore how that strong ontology is expected to be applied in various situations by its masters. Strong ontologies tend to isolate themselves and those who apply them. Consequently, they don’t work well in ages such as ours. Weak ontologies tend to be exploratory, but they have a tough time surviving very long. It is almost like the cell walls of plant cells versus animal cells. One is forceful, the other mobile. Both can find niches and thrive under various circumstances–a reason I am interested in ecology and evolution.

As I have already suggested, we are in an age where there is, in general, much greater interaction (e.g. globalization and Web 2.0). This age is causing much friction between various ontologies and the identities they support. As such, there are many identity-related crises and counter-crises of nationalism, fundamentalism, terrorism, classism, racism, etc.

I take no specific position regarding most ontologies. But I do tend to hold very weak boundary objects myself. I also respect, or try to respect, those with deep beliefs of one sort or another. I am generally inclined toward a pragmatic tolerance. I have my biases and boundaries, too.

The topics I treat in Identity Unknown relate to the milieu of all these considerations. I’d be happy to have your comments or, if you are truly engaged, your contributions.

This all sounds most interesting, and the focus on ontologies is right up my street. However, when I subscribed to the blog's feed, I found that very many of the posts (of which there are very many) make no explicit mention of identity itself. This seems to be mainly a link blog, with content very loosely constellated around "identity", with the occasional bit of commentary from Ryan. I shall give it a good try out in my aggregator and report back on anything of particular interest to identity truth seekers.