Linkalicious: 8/9/07

Dear readers, here are some interesting tidbits, hastily proffered. More substantial posts coming your way soon.

• In strict botanical parlance, bananas are berries -- but strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries are not.
• Google's Chinese name is "Gu Ge," which translates to "harvest song." This is a bit more appealing than the translation of Google's English name: old hound.
• A people-search engine called Spock is currently in beta. Among other things, it's an interesting new way to manage one's online identity. Let me know if you'd like an invite.
• TV's really all about the ads -- particularly on a new site that NBC will be launching, called Didja.com. This site will offer visitors nothing but ads, both classic and contemporary.

Tags: Linkalicious Spock Didja.com banana berry berries Gu Ge

Blogging lapses and shifts in digital identity

I've been done with the school year for a week now. My internship doesn't kick off until next Friday, so I've been luxuriating in what feels like a vast expanse of free time. Directed by my whims, I've been walking around my neighborhood, watching great films (I highly recommend The Lives of Others), and spending leisurely swaths of time in local coffeeshops. As for the Wall St Journal that appears in my building lobby every morning -- I'm actually reading it now, rather than just glancing at it.

I've also been spending plenty of time in bed. That's where I'm at right now!

With all this free time, why the almost-month-long lapse in this blog? I've been following blogs for six years now, and the blogging lapse is a common phenomenon. Bloggers go on hiatus for a spell, and then invariably return with an apologetic post: life's been busy.

But I don't think this is why blogging lapses occur. Trust me, one can always find time to blog. :) Rather, I think it's a matter of uncertainty about how to go about constructing one's digital identity. Blogging allows people to build an online representation -- a Googleable self that is traceable by anyone around the world, presumably for a very long time to come. It's a pretty exciting opportunity, particularly for narcissists such as myself.

I've stepped back from blogging recently simply because I've been processing the changes I've gone through over the past year. As this round of processing comes to a close (I feel this happening soon), my blogging will kick off again. It's like an internal tectonic shift is going on. In a good way. Ok, perhaps not the best metaphor.

Along these lines of thought, check out this interesting article. It explores the question: what motivates Second Life users to select avatars that bear no resemblance to their real-life selves? Perhaps a better question is: when you have no limits on how you can appear in a virtual world, why pick an avatar that exactly resembles yourself (which is basically what I did in SL)?

As a recent WSJ article describes (subscription required, but you can see the video here), this really may be a generational issue. Today's teenagers and early-twentysomethings are much more comfortable with their digital selves than us older folks. We oldsters cautiously try and put our best face forward, whereas the younguns accept the very public nature of the internet and just express themselves.

An overgeneralization, to be sure, but it's clear that things are changing.

Tags: MBA blogging digital identity blogging lapse processing

Building a business plan in Second Life

A few evenings ago a classmate and I met with a couple of programmers to discuss applications (the details of which I'll keep mum) that they are building in Second Life. I took a screenshot as our avatars sat around a floating table on the roof of tall building. That's me with my back to the camera, and my classmate is seated to my right. The programmers are the two other guys.

I've roamed around Second Life on my own over the past few months, but this was the first time I've participated in a structured meeting "in-world," as they say. Communicating via Skype conference call and some in-world IM, we kicked around ideas for building a business plan. My classmate and I are going to work with a few other classmates on doing the market research and drafting the business plan, and we'll enter it in a competition in a few months.

To say the least, I'm finding this thoroughly fascinating. With the time-intensive first quarter in the MBA program complete, we're encouraged to start exploring directions in business that catch our fancy. The business plan competition is one avenue for this, as is the Business Consulting Network, which I am also participating in.

Tags: Second Life business plan UW MBA

OpenID and digital identity

Doing research for one of my group projects this evening, I ran across a post about the growing interest in Identity 2.0: tools are appearing that facilitate a digital identity that you can use anywhere online.

OpenID appears to be the most well-known.

I'd love to look into this further, but I've got to get back to my project research at moment. It's an interesting project, actually, exploring the future of corporate blogging and its implications for business.

Tags: OpenID digital identity

Telos and transition

Five years ago, I started up an account with LiveJournal. I kept the "LJ" going for a few years. It was a digital identity that reflected who I was at that time: hypersocial and thoroughly extroverted, revelling in bizarre and self-deprecating humor.

I eventually deleted my LJ because the writing began to feel stale. The digital identity no longer conveyed my real interests, which were evolving.

So I decided to start over from a clean slate on Blogger. I originally dubbed the new blog Foibles' Follies. I thought the blog would consist of more self-deprecating humor -- just better written. But when I finally got round to writing posts this past June, I changed the name to Fixing Foibles & Follies.

The name explained
Foible has actually been my online moniker since 1993. Defined as a minor weakness or failing of character, it's long been one of my favorite words. Weaknesses and failings are particularly fascinating to me. This isn't because I'm a "glass half empty" sort who focuses on the negative. Much to the contrary, I'm a very optimistic person. I just firmly believe in thorough familiarity with one's weaknesses -- knowledge of the inner demons, if you will -- as a path of growth. You can't be truly strong unless you know where you are weak.

We can extrapolate beyond ourselves, to the entire planet. Foibles and follies are inarguably widespread. For example, many folks have been focusing on the short term, at the expense of the long term. My goal (or "telos" if you prefer a cooler word) with this blog is to look at the foibles and follies as fixable. Hence, the Fixing bit.

Plus, I like alliteration.

What lies ahead
It's been a busy time of transition for me over the past week as I've gotten ready for business school, which started today. In future posts, I'll be delving into what I'm learning, and explore the MBA program experience a bit. But I'll continue to tie topics to my main interest: how business and technology can help fix foibles and follies.

Tags: blogging foible digital identity

Bloggishness: blogging about blogging

Thanks to Pam Blackstone's three column template post, I've redesigned this blog a bit. I definitely prefer her three-column style to the two-column Blogger template that I'd been using.

I've also been poking about through the sites that cater to bloggers. There is a dizzying array of such services, all catering to bloggers' desires to increase traffic on their sites. BlogExplosion offers an interesting approach: you earn credits by surfing member blogs. You can then redeem those credits by assigning traffic to your blog. Essentially, this puts you at the front of the BlogExplosion surfing queues, so you are guaranteed immediate hits. The problem, though, is that these surfers are randomly coming across your site, and they probably won't be interested in its subject matter. I've noticed that all my BlogExplosion visitors tend to quickly view and leave, which is a little disappointing.

Wikablog is a simple blog directory, a la Wikipedia. It's very easy to build a public, editable page for your blog, and tag it with categories. However, I found that although my blog shows up in some categories (business and internet), it doesn't show up in several other categories that I chose. Wikablog seems relatively unknown; I'll be curious to see if it catches on.

I also joined BlogShares, but I confess that my cursory glance through its help documentation has left me pretty confused. It appears to be a sort of stock market that trades blogs. Web traffic increases the value of a blog. How might this sort of virtual economy evolove, one wonders? For example, the virtual world Second Life already has its own thriving economy, including a stock market. Our digital identities -- or avatars -- are becoming an increasingly important part of our lives. How closely will our financial lives be intertwined with the popularity (web traffic, etc) of our digital selves?

In this blog's "Bloggishness" section (right-hand column) I'll be displaying links to the blog sites that I participate in.

Tags: blogger blogging template BlogExplosion Wikablog BlogShares digital identity

The future of social networking

Check out this delightful little commentary by a 35 year old geek who doesn't "get" Myspace. I like this bit:

I'm looking at MySpace and I'm a fumbling old colonel struggling to comprehend his nephew's digital watch.

I do see where the fellow's coming from. I kind of hate Myspace, myself (the flash ads drive me insane). This is why I deleted my original account last year. But...everybody's on Myspace. To not participate in Myspace, as garish and annoying as this site is, is to effectively shut oneself out of an environment that is becoming an increasingly important way for people to connect with each other. All the Myspace media coverage over the past year has painted a picture of parents in their 40s and 50s who aren't just mystified by Myspace -- they feel threatened by it. There's nothing really new or interesting about this: teenagers have always wanted to develop their identities independently (to some degree) of their parents, and parents of teenagers have always wrestled with how to best let their progeny do this without irreparably damaging themselves in the process.

So Myspace is the gender gap wedge du jour. I don't think this will last long. Cultivating a "digital identity" is becoming a crucial part of maintaining a happy, successful life in the real world (look at LinkedIn, for example). Social networking sites are here to stay, and more and more people, including the currently suspicious parents, will be joining the bandwagon. There will be social networking sites that cater to them. We'll see a proliferation over the next few years of such sites. This will get pretty confusing, trying to track who's on which sites (for some people, this confusion is already a reality).

This confusion will eventually be fixed by a "grand interoperability" between all sites. A tool or service of some sort will make things easier: you'll be able to have one digital identity, or avatar, and access everything through that. People will still inhabit different digital domains that cater to their interests: there will be a Myspace for kids and a Theirspace for grownups. But disparate groups will be able to connect through public avatars...something you can quickly update and that will auto-populate your various social networking accounts. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

Tags: social networking digital identity myspace avatar