With all the drama around claims that blogging is dead I find myself more confused than ever about content production, sharing, and everything in between. As someone who embraces the whole idea of sharing stuff, you’d think I wouldn’t be at such odds with myself over a few basics. I find myself constantly struggling with the notion that this blog can be the home for nearly all of my stuff … yet I go out and start a photo blog, start pumping content into Tumblr, and ignore posting to the one place that is under my control. I’ve been really trying to figure out why I find...

After last week’s experiment with crowd sourcing the definition for “community” I was curious to see if we could keep the momentum going with a new community question.  This week I am hoping to hear from you as it relates to the concept of “identity.”  This is another one of those terms that we all throw around quite a bit — does it refer to a role you play in a particular social context, is it a mash-up of all the stuff you do on and offline, or is it something all together different?  I’ve written and struggled with this concept in the context of...

I am seriously conflicted about the state of my own digital identity. On one hand I am thrilled to see the wealth of social sites out there filling specific niches, giving us new ways to share and express ourselves. But, to say that I am a bit underwhelmed by the lack of meta connections these sites afford is an understatement. I have a few thoughts that are really beginning to pull me in new directions. I’ll start with Twitter as an example of my overall frustration. I use it, not as much as some, but I am usually paying attention to the stream and even update a handful of times each...

About two years ago I was hooked on the idea of building a social life stream application … I went so far as to email a few of the smart people I know, sharing diagrams, and video chatting with said smart people to see about building something. After I spent hours and hours drawing sketches and driving myself crazy I sort of gave up on the idea. My idea was to not only stream my stuff into one place, but to organize all my friends stuff based on the social network/online spaces they publish in. We’d all have accounts with our own stream in them, but could pull together everyone...

Not in any real sense, just reacting to the fact that my host, StartLogic, had me down for a full day. I spent the better part of an hour with them on their support line to find out that there was, “an issue with my server.” Great insight. They assured me that I would be back up very shortly and that my “datas” were safe. Well let’s just say that they were telling half truths. Clearly something big melted down as I was offline for a full day and when I did come back my post from last night was gone. I was able to grab the post from the RSS feed, but the downtime...

I have been writing and talking about how Twitter has seemed to re-emerge in my life recently. I can’t seem to shake my re-found need to connect and share with the vibrant Twitter community. As a matter of fact, we spent quite a bit of time talking about it on ETS Talk 41 this week as well … So much of it has to do with the extended network I can connect to, but recently I am finding myself really engaged in my local tweets. As my friend Scott McDonald remarked at lunch the other day when I was saying I haven’t been this plugged in since this time last year, “its the...

One of the nice new additions to this year’s TLT Symposium are the beautifully designed Tag stickers. These were designed by Audrey Romano in ETS — I think the overall idea was a joint venture between the Symposium project manager, Allan Gyorke, and all the members of the committee. What I like is that they focus on the idea that people all over our campus are doing really interesting things with the platforms we are working on … in a lot of cases, many of these people don’t get the chance to talk directly with each other about what they are doing. So one way to overcome...

So its been over a full week since my last post (as a recovering Catholic, that phrase sounds really familiar) … I have been on the road and have had little time to pull thoughts together in any real sense, but that doesn’t mean my head hasn’t been working overtime. A while back I was invited to give a talk at the University of South Florida, so I jumped on a plane and headed to Tampa last Thursday to talk to a group of faculty, staff, and students about student expectations and the tools we are looking at to engage them. It was a blast — right up until I had to come...