Social networking comes full circle. FrontPorchForum connects me to my very own neighbors and I am lovin' it! Read more here

[A New DevLife Post]

One of the most memorable things about this year's Women in I.T. luncheon at TechEd, was Scott Bellware, who attended, telling me afterward that he was surprised to learn how much women talk with each other about work life balance. He thinks that men of course think and worry about this all of the time, but it is not something men generally discuss among themselves. ("How 'bout those Mets, huh?")

So seeing this article "Eight Great Lessons from Working Dads" on MSN's CareerBuilder.com about men and work/life balance definitely caught my eye.

In listing the "new MSN bloggers", Robert lists Dare Obasanjo as "Dare Obansajo (program manager on backend)". I shivered at the prospect of Dare having anything to say about my back end. I bet he would whip me back into shape quickly, but it would mean lots less programming and lots less blogging and probably a little bit of whining!

Actually, the real news is the website that these blogs are on! spaces.msn.com. It looks very wallopy (which makes sense since Wallop is Microsoft's research project and spaces is probably coming from that research). Though Wallop is on a very different level. But still, msn is for the masses, so spaces will bring blogging and social computing to the masses. Very cool. This looks big!

Read more here on [one of] Dare's [other] blog[s]

Robert! (she said, with hands on hips! I'm allowed cause I'm older - nah nah nah) What you say in your post here, is just why I left Orkut a month ago!

http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2004/02/10/70639.aspx

lest we forget how important our human contacts are...

Brian Dear wrote about an “orkut moment” he had recently, which led me to the realization that in most cases, orkut is a good way to just see what people look like. My account is still active, so I just looked him up (knowing he is a member) and now I know what he looks like. Of course there are obnoxious people like me who post pictures that are only representative of themselves. Here is what I have used for my orkut picture.

I had planned on changing that to a photo of my kayak in the spring.

I did it. I quit. maybe someday there will be value. Right now it looks to me like nothing more than a public popularity contest.

oh give me a break!

Christian Crumlish sent an email out to his entire network (if mine's 30,000+, I'm sure his is at least that)

subject: is orkut over?

text: looks like everybody got bored. does anyone have tetris?

heh heh...

I saw on Halley Suitt's blog this a.m. and was reminded in an email from O'Reilly press this p.m. that Joe Trippi just got added to O'Reilly's Emerging Tech Conference next week. They have a whole day  called the Digital Democracy Teach-In. I read somewhere that it is Joe Trippi that people run to for autographs during some of the (past) Dean travels.

Shelley Powers did it.  I am thinking of doing the same. Can anyone tell me what it's good for besides tallying how popular you are?

“You are connected to 26313 people through 14 friends.”

Why do I need 26,299 new friends?

Okay so now I am getting something like spam in orkut. You can send an email blast to all of your friends (I have like 10) or to the whole network of friends of friends of freinds... mine says 12,858. So I can't say the messages I'm getting are coming from 10th generation friends or anything - in fact they are only one away, so each of these is from someone who is a direct friend of someone who is my own personal direct friend. I just don't know... I will keep looking at it. I am not inviting anybody else in. I only invited 2 people who weren't already in and one of them really is anti-orkut! Don't take it personally. It doesn't make sense for me to do that when I don't quite believe in whatever it is yet.

I do have to say that I did get this apology in a message though:

“I shoulda done the math on friend of friends before pushing the button. yeeeeagh! “

So, maybe also a lot of this is just that people have to figure out how to use it and what they want to do with it...

Halley, I totally hear ya! I just don't GET it. Yeah, I got invited, and checked it out and invited you too, but that was about a week ago and now I am really wondering what the point is. I *have* a network. In fact, sometimes I think I am overnetworked. I don't know what Orkut adds to the mix. Except flattery. I was flattered by some of the invites I had. But [wo]man cannot live on ego alone!

I have made so many new friends this year through blogging, attending conferences and the many community related things I have been involved in (INETA, other user groups, MVP, etc etc).

There is now way in the world I can think to send individual holiday cheers to each and every one of the people I would like to.

So hopefully a good chunk of those people read my blog and know that  I am wishing everyone a Happy Hannukah, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy [fill in the blank if your not covered] and all good wishes for happiness and success.

Also to Steven and Amy, THANKS!!!!

Truly,

Julie

This article was featured in our local groovy weekly Seven Days this past week. It's not about the whole blog phenom around the DeanforAmerica campaign, but another aspect - the use of the meetups.com site to create Dean related gathering. It is as much a social computing phenomenon as what Dean has done with his blog. Meetups.com was hardly used before Michael Silberman got his hands on it. I wanted to point it out since Halley Suitt has been writing so much about the web side of Dean's campaign lately. Halley doesn't have comments so this was the best I could do...