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.

“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

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).

• 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

I also plan to mix english and french content and encourage my friends and family to participate.

This is an extract from my other blog explaining the shift.

There are however, I feel, two types of readers and visitors. Those attracted by personal comments and life in general and those more interested by technical and professional topics.

I have started another blog for all those technical, web 2.0, social apps, cms, wms and edh posts that I intend to write from my viewpoint. I am a fiftysomething geek. I am not alone and I want to understand and be a part of the new social web and help others be a part of it too.

Most of these sites and webapps seem aimed at my younger friends but already there appears to be some social divide between twentysomethings and thirtysomethings while fortysomethings and fiftysomethings are a little lost. But are they? Is that just my perception of a non-existant problem?

If you are happy just finding out what’s going on in Geneva and in my life and want a hug and wave from time to time. Pop over to (blog.graham-lawrence.com). It’s going to get personal. It’s finally having a distinct style of it’s own.

Rather than send you a click further away I’ve hosted a copy of it here if you have an hour to spend.

He is quite a charismatic speaker and my hour was soon over. I specially liked his reference to rss feeds when he suggests both feeds and email tend to suck the time out of our days. I for one am seriously thinking of just reading my email and feeds just a few times per day and actually doing stuff the rest of the day. There again I’m a very good procrastinator in search of disciplined ways of getting things done.

She was musing over the fact that some Facebook users are worried over the collision between private and business profiles. She says :

“As a Facebook “expert” I get asked: “what Facebook apps do you use?” “why not just email instead of using Facebook messages?” I do my best to answer and sometimes wonder just what it is about Facebook that has so captured the minds of numerous thirty-somethings.

For this generation of thirty-something web users much of their business marketability has come from being web-literate, young, and in touch with the latest Internet trends. As a new generation joins the work force who is younger and learned to use a computer before they learned how to ride a bike the value of the thirty-somethings is slowly changing from youth and knowledge of current trends to experience. I suspect that many who try to join Facebook to prove their youth are instead finding that it makes them feel old.”

If the thirty-somethings are supposed to be feeling old where does that leave me and those in my age group? Do we fifty-somethings have somewhere nice to go on the web? Are there social apps geared toward us hidden somewhere? Is age a problem?

That got me to thinking that during the preparation of my daughter Jennifer’s wedding we spent some time with two of her friends that will be getting married in a few weeks time. They are a wonderful couple and we spent a few really nice evenings with them.

I remember saying in my wedding speech, while thanking them for their contribution, that only a few decades separated us from a great friendship.

Generations don’t mix easily in the real world and it would seem that they don’t fare much better online.

More than any other medium in the world, the time commitment difference between sender and receiver is huge. For instance, if you call me on the phone and we chat for 10 minutes, that’s 10 minutes of your time and 10 minutes of my time. If you write me a handwritten letter and I write you one back, that’s maybe 30 minutes of your time and 30 minutes of my time. If we exchange text messages, that’s 10 seconds from you and 10 seconds from me. But with email, often times the sender will ask two or three open-ended one sentence questions which elicit multi-paragraph answers. In these cases, the sender spends one minute and the receiver is asked, implicitly, to spend maybe an hour.

(Mike Davidson [here is the original post])

Now in my case if you send me a text message it may take you 10 seconds but it will take me minutes. Sign me up to the text messaging challenged group.

Be sure to read the article. Now maybe I’ll translate his web response to French.

I have a sidebar on my blog with the blogs of friends that I visit.

I’ve been on the web before it became the web (long story) and I’m an early adopter when it comes to buying into new technology. Specially when it comes to gadgets!

Some things take longer to sink in and although I’m a little ashamed I admit that I saw a poll today of how people read their feeds It was from reading the results that I learnt that most people use a web-based reader and a lot of them pick Google Reader.

I may be a little thick at times but I don’t think I’m an idiot or can’t change my mind on something so I’ve just set it up.

Although I’ll keep using Netvibes for all non feed related widgets I’m crossing over to the other side and adopting Google reader.

I honestly think that it will save me time and that is what we all have as a precious commodity. I think I will also just consult it a few times a day. The other problem with Netvibes is that the feeds are there but you have to reclick many times to get where you want to go.

I like to think of it as being the difference between going around your neighborhood looking for stuff and looking in all the shop windows or just having all that news delivered to your doorstep.

I’ll give you an update in a few days but would welcome any input or advice you could give me.

I often wonder if my dedicated readers just watch my feeds or actually visit or under what conditions they physically visit the blog.