When is a blog not a blog?
This is what we've been asking ourselves this month. While. professionally, most of my contacts have blogs or at least know intimately what blogs are, privately, 80% of my friends don't blog and around 30% are too embarassed to tell me they don't know what a blog is for fear that I'll ridicule them in mine. The fools!
For all their air of popular culture, blogs are still a minority activity for people who like writing - yet, here I am, offering 'etribes Life' accounts to everyone I know and, you know what, they are simply delighted to accept. That is, as long as I don't call it a 'blog'.
I get the feeling there are thousands of non-bloggers out there just waiting to start blogging without realising it. They just need a service with another name. There's so much in a word...
Les Blogs here we come!
I've just booked my place at Les Blogs the up-coming blogging summit in Paris. Very much looking forward to meeting people and telling them all about etribes Life... Oh, and listening to what they have to say, of course!
I'm especially interested to talk with investors, exclitable bloggers and journalists - so if you're there and you want to meet up - email me @ luke at etribes.com.
e-democracy without the tears
I attended the Hansard Society's e-Democracy event in London on 9th Nov. It was the usual odd mix of local authority staff, dot-comers, political activists and eager politicians. The keynote speech by Stephen Coleman of the Oxford Internet Institute included lots of interesting facts and figures about how slowly people have responded to the Government's urgings to get politically active online.
He seemed to say that, by using the Internet cleverly, we might get people interested in politics. As anyone who has ever run an online community knows - you'll never interest anyone in anything they aren't already interested in by using the Internet - because you've only ever got around 5 seconds of their attention to do it in!
Personal Digital Identity
You only need to spend 5 mins with Simon Grice to understand why Personal Digital Identity is going to change the way we live. For anyone not familiar with PDID (or Simon, for that matter) it's essentailly the ability for someone to digitally control their personal data and to restrict who can access it to those that need to access it.
Midentity is one of the companies that will change the way we manage our data and is leading the way in Europe, while Plaxo and others are doing the same across the pond. I give it 2-3 years before my mum hears about it - which is a pretty good yardstick for when it hits mainstream consciousness.
