Blogs as Social Software

I've never been one for sites like Ryze, LinkedIn, MySpace etc, they mostly don't interest me in the same way that desperate "Networking" events make me ill.

But blogs are social networking tools and they have real effects in the real world. Yesterday for example, I've had lunch with Mark Bradley at ATP Innovations, because he reads this stuff and likes it, we talked shop if not yet business. Last night I went to the IA Peers meetup where the guest of honour was Lou Rosenfeld, co-author of "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. He was running a one-day 41350 workshop, we got to chat with the guy for nix and walk his jetlagged head back to his hotel.

Tonight I'm having dinner with Euan Semple from The Obvious, because he stopped off with Jon husband from Wirearchy (which we are busy instantiating) in Vancouver on his way to Sydney. We'll talk shop.

I met Jon and his partner Ramen through this blog, stayed with them in Vancouver last November and will probably see them again in April or May. It hit home when I checked his blog today and there, on his photo stream, was something really familiar.

When I can get to know and interact with all these folks, in just a week, and identify the corner of a kitchen in Vancouver, and the door to the room I crashed in, for no other reason than I run a blog, something is happening.

When I can get an invite to a conference half a world away because someone reads this thing, not once, but twice. To find myself talking networked business models with Dave Weinberger and drinking Dave Isenberg's beer and luistening to Clay Shirky and Dana Boyd and then get another invite to New Hampshire to share a weekend with Vandana Shiva and Eric von Hippel and catch up with Rishab Ghosh, something is happening.

Jon calls it Wirearchy, I call it bloody amazing.

Comments

[Ton Zijlstra]

Hi Earl,

Both you and Jon are right, it is bloody amazing, this wirearchy :)
The pure joy of seeing all these connections emerge when I started blogging is what kept me doing it. Last night in a conversation with Lilia Efimova, I said that even if all my postings would get lost right now, it wouldn't really matter, because of the relationships that exist because of it. If those relationships are still clear to me, the information flow will be reconstructable.

I always explain social software as "tools in which relationships come first and information second", the tools are smaller than us, we are in control, and we can use them to build, nurture and sustain those relationships. That is what makes them social, not the actual writing itself.

And that really is bloody amazing to me too.