Where (the heck) is weaverluke?

Apologies for the long blog silence. I have been busy raising seed capital (done!) and procuring a development solution (done—development starts today!!) for Blog Friends.

I also will be spending some quality time on the Identity Society wiki over the next weeks, and probably going into hospital to have a tiny fragment of dental filling that is lodged in my sinus removed with a drill and an endoscope (gulp—but I have had a headache since October last year!).

So bear with me, friends. I have not forsaken you. ; )

weaverluke—now also on Facebook!

So I followed the stampeding herd and set up a weaverluke outpost on Facebook. If we aren't "friends" there already, please do stop by and friend me. : )

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!

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!

weaverluke gets a strapline

I've been thinking that weaverluke blog needs a strapline, so I came up with this one (displayed beneath the blog's title):

"Drawing together the threads of Identity"

I guess I better make sure I put in at least one wrong stitch into my tapestry in case God gets angry with me (hmm, somehow I think that shouldn't be a problem then... ; )

Sidebar revamp

I have just revamped the content of weaverluke's sidebar, in the hope of making the blog:

1. more accessible to new readers,
2. more useful to existing ones, and
3. more informative for my professional contacts.

Take a look and let me know what you think—all constructive criticism welcomed!

weaverluke blog—an introduction

Q: What do psychology, economics, id cards, memory, shopping, the web, brand, the environment, ethics, neurology, privacy and surveillance (and myriad other topics) all have in common?

A: Identity. I believe that approaching our experience of ourselves, each other and our world in terms of identity—and its corollorary concept, value—enables us to draw together diverse threads of enquiry into a self-consistent intellectual framework.

Within such a framework, it would be possible to attain wisdom about what makes us human beings thrive, individually and collectively (in social groups, companies, nations, as a race), where only fragmented understandings have previously existed.

At the same time, understanding identity is ever more crucial to the achievement of very specific and tangible challenges—such as how to manage brands, deliver personalised advertising, evolve effective business models, create a workable id card scheme, create successful virtual worlds and virtual currencies and facilitate ethical and environmentally sustainable consumer behaviours.

This blog, founded in summer 2004, is my attempt to contribute towards our understanding of identity in both broadly abstract and tangibly specific ways. (And because that quest can come to seem awful serious sometimes, along the way I look for opportunities to indulge in a little silliness.)

I warmly invite you to join the identity conversation at weaverluke by subscribing to blog updates—and adding your thoughts, if you are so inspired, in the post comments. If you would like to explore a particular sub-topic on the blog, please click on the links in this post, above.

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.

Moo-ed!

Here are the nine designs I have created for my 100 Moo cards, which are now on order.

Each design highlights a different aspect of this blog's overarching subject, identity, with an appropriate quotation from my blog posts. Hopefully, specific cards will help me to convey to each person I network with the relevance of identity to their own field of interest—identity does have amazingly broad relevance, but then again, people's eyes tend to glaze over unless you can make it relevant to them personally.

I used Photoshop to create the designs, which was pretty straightforward. The card creation process on the Moo site was also very simple in general, although I found that every time I wanted to edit my order details, the site wiped my credit card details (without warning), which was a bit annoying. All in all, I found Moo a fun and useful service. The real proof, of course, (of Moo and of my design skills!) will be in the quality and effectiveness of the printed cards themselves.

Now we are 100

I just saw on my Feedburner stats page that weaverluke blog now has 100 readers. Yay, next stop the "A list"! ; )

Dear reader

Darren Rowse at problogger has come up with 34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from your Blog, many of which I recognise as reasons that I myself have unsubscribed from blogs over the years:

• Too many posts (the post levels are too overwhelming) - 37
• Infrequent Posting (or the blog is effectively dead) - 29
• Partial Excerpts Feeds - 25
• Blog Changes Focus (too much off topic posting) - 23
• Too many posts that I see elsewhere (Redundant, Repeated or Recycled News) - 19
• Uninteresting Content - 16
• Irrelevant Content - 13
• The Blogger’s Ego - Too much self promotion - 11
• Low Quality Content - 11
• Too many posts that are too long - 10
• Negative blogging - 7
• Feed Errors - Especially when a Feed Reloads the latest 10-20 posts every time - 7
• Offensive Content/Personal attacks/Discrimination - 6
• ‘infomercials’ (too much selling) - 6
• Blog Titles that Don’t Tell what the post is about - 5
• No or Poor Formatting in posts - 5
• My own interests as a reader change - 5
• No Longer Useful or Valuable - 4
• Too many links in the text and not enough content - 4
• Advertising - 3
• Inconsistent writing (style and focus) - 2
• Too Many Grammatical Errors - 2
• Found other feeds that are better - 2
• Too Narrow a focus - 1
• Too much repetition in topic - 1
• Pushiness of Blogger - 1
• Blogger Doesn’t Respond to Comments - 1
• No Images in the feed - 1
• Lack of Confidence or Opinion - 1
• Lack of a sense of who the blogger is - 1
• Too much clutter/extras at the end of posts - 1
• Talking Down to Readers - 1
• Too many quotes - 1
• Change of Primary blogger - 1

Whoops, I guess this "identity" blog just contravened point 4!

For those of you still subscribed, I shall endeavour to avoid these 34 sins in future as best I am able. Nothing would sadden me more than for you, my readers, to come to identify weaverluke with blabber-mouthed-ness, inconsistency, verbosity (gulp, this is a long sentence), inaccessibility, unoriginality, boredom (still with me?), irrelevance, ego, overt commercialisation, negativity, shabbiness, link overkill—or simple duff-ness.

(Phew, I restored the identity theme to this post. ; )

Re-threading the weaverluke loom

You may have noticed a steady flow of identity-related posts over the last week or so. This is no accident. You see, I've decided to channel my creative energies into weaverluke blog in a more focused and consistent way.

It won't be long now till weaverluke blog reaches its three-year milestone. I still remember with fondness one of my first posts, from June 2004, which cited a poem found on the door of a public toilet. But while I have put a lot of energy and care into this blog at various times over the last years, I haven't ever given it the consistency of application and sharpness of focus that it really deserves.

From now on, I aim to blog at least once a day, typically on the topic of identity. Hopefully, this will help weaverluke blog to become a more reliable and useful resource for anyone interested in identity.

However, while Feedburner tells me I have 56 subscribers, I only know a few of you personally. As many of you probably have experienced, blogging can feel like a rather solitary pursuit when comments are few and far between (although I treasure each one I receive). Also, your feedback is really helpful in choosing things to write about that interest you, my readers.

So please, if you feel so inspired, comment or blog away on posts you have something to say about—whether good, bad, or other! (Incidentally, CoComment furnishes a great way to track your comment conversations from the comfort of your feed reader). Tell me what you like, don't like, would like. Share your own thoughts and experiences. Tell me where you blog, or about your other projects. It's always great to hear from you.

And if you do find posts here of value, feel free to let others know about them by clicking the "Add this..." link in the footer of the post* and tagging the post with "identity" in your bookmarking/rating service of choice. I hope to foster here a community of diverse people who share interest in identity, particularly in its subjective and personal aspects.

Meanwhile, I shall keep on thinking and writing, doing my best to make at least a small amount of sense of a sometimes confusing and challenging world. I shall take refuge in my blog. : )

*This link appears in my blog feed only.