I’m trying to get the network-surfing thing, I really am. I still think weblogs are a much richer way to get to know people than profile forms.
Instead of shoehorning people’s taste into a few favorites, a blog lets you check out what people are reading and watching and listening to.
Blog posts are conversational. They invite response, and it’s easy enough to join the conversation in comments.
Writing a blog post is easy. You have something to say; and people in mind to say it to, and write.
Writing a profile entry is really, really hard. Abstracting the essence of one’s identity into a paragraph or two is a miserable, impossible task.
And it feels barely relevant; one’s identity is made up of a series of interactions, moments, perceptions, actions. A blog captures the flow of identity. A profile forces you to pin it like a butterfly to a page.
The confluence of friend-of-a-friend networks and blogging to form true identity
BookBlog: Friendster-surfing I agree; keeping profiles up to date in Zerendipity is one of the most significant challenges. Blogging engines…
Adina,
Perhaps Ecademy http://www.ecademy.com has the best online networking model, because it combines profiles, public threaded messaging, private e-mail, IM, blogging, and “communities of practice” sub-grouping (i.e. SIGs).
This combination enables the discovery of a person’s “substantive” persona to be best represented on a single platform, and nurtures the possibility of serendipity. For a more private networking experience, I favor the distributed P2P model — see my GeoBridge Project http://geobridge.webhop.net for more details.
David H. Deans
http://daviddeans.webhop.net
Austin, Texas
I agree with David (perhaps because we’ve spend a good deal of time arguing on the topic 🙂 ). While blogs offer a certian class of individuals an effective medium to express their personalities, they don’t offer the same depth of communication and communication organization. The Ryze/ecademy model is by far the best I’ve found at “randomly meeting” people of interest. The Friendster/LinkedIn/Spoke/ZeroDegrees/etc style application seems to be much more suited at very narrowly targeted searches (“I need to find a VP at Cisco” or “I need to find a single blonde in Boise”).