graham is here too

So here we are in another evolution of my blog and as you can see I’ve moved away from the traditional chronological post blog to a more magazine style of website. As often happens, my children are a constant source of inspiration so don’t be surprised that they are part of this article and are prominent in the lead photo.

The latest changes are a result of the stress I feel, on busy days, of posting an article

I just checked in to find I haven’t uttered in a while (exact details are too embarrassing). I’m going to rectify that but not here from work!
How are you doing? It’s cold in Geneva today. The wind just makes it wind-chilling worst.
Mobile post sent by justgraham using Utterz. Replies.

Sometimes it feels like I’m in a continual reorganisational mode.

I’m more organized than I was though. I know have my main blog, my business site, my moblog et a few others. I’ll Mindmap them!

I set up this blog to test run my new professional site and now I’ve moved that to it’s real home. I’m probably going to use this as a tech tryout zone. Now I’m on utterz you can find them here for the time being.

You know how it goes (or you don’t in which case I envy you )

When you have some difficulties in keeping up with one blog, you will of course have problems maintaining two!!

I haven’t updated here in a while but now that my main blog is more active I will be testing out stuff here rather than over there.

I want to obtain a magazine style blog with articles maintained in categories. Unfortunately in my main blog and due to the absence of tags until recently I have far too many categories and far too few tags

As there are few posts here I will rearrange things here and use this as a testing bed.

I read an interesting article on the BBC News pages this morning concerning social networks. The conclusion of the article is that social networks are often walled gardens and profile informaton is rarely exportable or importable. Here is an extract:

“The irony of the current generation of online social networks is that although their premise is leveraging the internet to connect people, their own lack of interconnectedness is stifling their potential.”

As each social network (and there are a surprising number of them) vies for your attention in every niche you could imagine you find yourself with a choice. Either you restrain your membership of these sites to just one or two or you find yourself filling up each and every profile with more or less the same information.

One solution would be to manage your profile separately (and preferably your private and public profiles as sub-profiles). One such approach would be to have an “Open Identity”.

There are several Open Identity initiatives and here is some further reading.

• The Higgins Project
• The identity Gang
• Identity Schemas
• The Liberty Alliance

So who am I? More importantly what sort of a person am I? I think these are important questions when you are planning (or being submitted to) an online presence.

I think I am slowly getting wiser concerning mine. I am certainly starting to be more realistic. You can’t be any different than you are in real life. If, like me, you have a modest social life, or don’t have tons of friends or party all week long, it is unlikely that your online presence will be any livelier.

This is in spite of social apps and the social web in general. In fact your online presence will probably be very similar to your offline presence. I for example really love chatting with people and discussing life in general but I flee from superficial contacts discussions about the weather, people news or anything meaningless for long periods of time.

I tend to have a plan and my interactions with others generally need to move from point A to point B to be meaningfull.

This is probably why I’ve had a hard time and sign up for a whole load of stuff (it’s so easy isn’t it: just a username and password and you’re in).

I also feel, but you might disagree, that being bilingual English and French and living in Switzerland takes me to the fringes of the social web because culturally the Swiss are different.

Well I’m getting more organised now and I’ll be telling you how it’s going. This is the start. Although I’ve left point A well behind I am far away from point B. I’ll keep you posted (pun intended).

Once a week I compile a list of links to portray what I’ve been looking at in the week gone by. Here, to start the ball rolling is an old list of links.

• Mixing real and virtual worlds (BBC - TechLab)
• Slap in the Facebook: It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up
• Why Twitter is not a fad
• Facebook Will Open, Let’s Start the Movement
• Mashable Supports the Open Friends Format (OFF?)
• Call for an open social network
• Is Facebook For Business?
• Jumptags, a little ahead of social bookmarking
• In case you missed it - comScore Report Shows Global Growth of Social Networks