Update on the Blog Draft Archives Project

a picture from a balcony looking down at people walking, watching, connecting at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City.
People watching, people connecting…

Of the original 419 blog post drafts, 76 drafts remain. From the first post of this silly project in early December until today’s post, I’ve revived/edited or nearly simply reposted 68 posts. That nearly eclipses my early blogging frenzy in the late 90’s/early 2000’s when I posted snippets nearly daily… many of those posts are now inaccessible due to transitions of blog archives, but they are not lost. One day I will figure out if I should (and how to) reconnect them here.

I am now posting 2-3 per week. Of the remaining drafts, I estimate there are up to 40-50 viable posts. Some require real work, others just some light editing. Probably fewer of the latter. I’ve weeded out most of the drafts that refer to links that are now broken, unable to connect to the sources that inspired the post. That makes me sad.

Happily, some of you have left comments and we have reconnected — sweetness. It reminded me of the importance of leaving comments. Euan Semple, I keep trying to comment on your blog, but I fear I have so many different WordPress identities, I keep failing at logging on. I will work on that but I’ve posted imaginary comments quite a few times in the past few months. Harold Jarche, I was thrilled you were happy to get a comment from me on YOUR blog. Ton, Alan, Darcy, Joitske, Mark, Christy, Monica, Robyn, Patrick, and Stephen, thanks for your comments so far. The 10 of you give me more energy than you might imagine!

Marie Crossing




Marie Crossing

Originally uploaded by Choconancy1

I learned yesterday that one of my wonderful online friends, Marie Jasinski of Australia passed away. I feel like I have known Marie for most of my online life, probably coming into contact around 1999 or 2000. She amazed me with her natural facilitation gifts, her curiosity to move beyond the “same old same old” and her innovation with games as a central part of learning and being together, especially online.

In 2006 I got to meet Marie F2F in her hometown of Adelaid. We got to go out to dinner and have a “girlfriends” night out. We talked about our work, our lives and of course, about food. On the way to dinner, I took this picture of Marie, mid street, mid sentence. I entitled it “Marie Crossing.”

Now Marie has crossed out of our physical world. Her light and energy, her insistence on pushing our learning forward, her love for the people around her will leave a big hole in our worlds, online and offline.

Marie, thank you for everything you brought into my life and into my worlds. Marty, and all of Marie’s closest, I’m sending massive love beams to see you through this crossing.

Update Jan 24 – More memories, a wiki to share your thoughts and see the comment below for an online memorial gathering tonight 9pm PST for those of us in the nothern hemisphere.

Jon Lebkowsky on Friends and Tipping Points

Jon Lebkowsky wrote this quite a while ago on WorldChanging. I had started a draft post and never got back to it. While doing a little blog-keeping today, I found it again and it is worth blogging. (Just a warning… there may be a little flood of blog posts to “catch up.”)

Jon thinks about what we mean by “friends” online. The Value of Connections

I have a lot of connections on Facebook – 415, to be exact. When I go there, I see quite a few friends doing interesting things, and I always have invitations to connect, join groups, join causes, etc. Facebook is a very effective social network platform, perhaps because people like me like the idea of having a place where we can connect with people we know. But the more people we connect with, the more demands there are on our limited attention, and the less truly engaged we can be with anyone.

On the other hand, the more people I connect to on Facebook, the more who will see my stuff. So if I ever do have a cause I want supported, or a message I want to circulate, having a large network would be helpful. The downside is that it feels less social and more like the broadcast model of publishing: one to many.

I do want more Facebook friends, but there are some significant issues to think about if I want to use the network effectively and avoid wasting my — and everyone’s — time. And there’s a distinction to be made between “social” and “mass.” As you get more and more connections you have more social overhead; as you scale up you run into an inherent limit on social media’s ability to remain social. If I value a broad attention base or large audience over effective manageable relationships, I should work from a different set of assumptions.

I still don’t have neat boxes for these thoughts and concepts; I have more that I’ll get into within the next few weeks. Meanwhile I’d like to hear your thoughts…

As I’ve written before, I hit some sort of volume wall the middle of last year. I’ve written about how I am now more selective on adding friends to follow on Twitter. I mostly ignore Facebook friend requests. I totally ignore Plaxo requests. Just the management of the requests has gone over the top, and I can handle a lot. The people I work with in NPOs and NGOs most likely would never even consider the work it requires to maintain a presence on one of the social networks.

But the friends, the contacts, the network is so powerful. Where is the balancing point for any one of us?

Oh as a little side note – an interesting self test on your online identity! I wonder what the relationship is between being “digitally distinct” and overwhelmed by maintaining that status. Oi!

“Your online identity score is 9 out of a possible score of 10. Congratulations. You are digitally distinct. This is the nirvana of online identity. Keep up the good work, and remember that your Google results can change as fast as the weather in New England. So, regularly monitor your online identity.