My Community

Many thanks to Stowe Boyd, Lars Trieloff and Emily Chang for this post.

Inspiration strikes in the weirdest places and for the weirdest reasons….I’m at an Enterprise 2.0 conference (E2.0) talking about the development of Web 2.0 and what happens? I get inspired to start an art blog. Who knew…

But thanks to the power of laptops (which I can’t stress enough: “everyone needs a laptop”), networking, and the intertron, inspiration has come. Let me tell you how this happened and maybe give you a little insight into the world of Web 2.0.

On day one of the conference I had lunch with Lars and he introduced me to Roller. A blog software that can host multiple blogs. One of my holy grails for blogging. Allowing you to build a community around your blogs and avoid the mass crowds on the popular sites. I hope to eventually use this to unite my multiple blogs together.

Next, I saw a presentation at E2.0 called “Social = Me First” by Stowe. It was a really good presentation that covers the philosophy of this movement, but I was really interested in something else. I wanted to know what is next? (blogs and wikis are already years old after all). Stowe’s answer was “flow app’s“. I delved into them a little bit and it appears that he is right. (sorry, but explaining more would only cloud up this little narrative and I haven’t gotten my brain around in yet, so click the link for more).

Learning about flow app’s led me to Emily’s site. She has created a myriad of sites, including ones for reviews of web 2.0 technology, a personal blog, an art blog, and a flickr profile. Bang, that is where inspiration struck. I am used to single sites like MySpace, where you have one huge page for all of your interests. Emily has taken that a step further establishing multiple sites where each one utilizes different aspects of the web and social dynamics. For example, her flickr account is just for her pictures and other pictophiles, and then on her artcodes blog she hosts individual photos that express some artistic interest.

It is this online portfolio or personal ecosystem that I like. In fact, what struck gold with me is the way that I can take previously personal and private interests and get them published. I can carve out my own home on the web, except instead of it being a homepage it is now a diverse ecosystem where my thoughts and interests can interact with millions of other folks worldwide.

Getting to those millions is the next step…maybe I will start with just bugging my girlfriend to visit them for now….

For those of you new to the web 2.0 world, these tools are easily available, mostly free, and easy to use. If you are interested here are some good ones: flickr, picasa, blogger, vox, 1& 1.