Buziaulane was started on Labour Day 2005 and will now go into its fourth year, daily registering events in the content and media business on the one hand and events on business trips. The blog has become a resource for content issues and electronic book developments as well as competition information on the Europrix and the World Summit Award. The blog is covering news from The Netherlands, my home country, but also from the rest of Europe, amongst others announcements and discussion from the European Commission, but is also looking at news from the US and where possible other parts of the world. In the three years we have reported on the World Summit Jury in Bahrain and Croatia as well as on the Europrix from the Austrian cities of Salzburg, Vienna and Graz.
I have looked back on the last year and have been thinking about the social networks as a big trend. The consumer social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Second Life, the professional networks as LinkedIn and Plaxo, the national networks like Hyves and the mobile networks like Twitter and all the intertwinings. In fact I received this week an invitation to join Second Brain (jee, what a creativity!). I have been lurking at most of these social networks and wondering where people save time to go on the networks: must be from free time or from watching television. And I must say that there are some nice aspects to the social networks. I have never had so many electronic anniversary cards than this year. I did not understand what triggered the senders, but understood later that I had filled out my date of birth on Facebook. I am happy with the social networks? For the basic intention of mapping a friends or professional network, it works, until you fall victim to a network fleecer, who rack up numbers of friends from others. I do not believe in numbers; you can have only a few real friends and more acquaintances. But what irritates me most in the social networks are the minute by minute announcements by some people. They still spare you from telling when they go to the toilet and the nature of their toilet session. I think this fad is over for me. But these social networks have hardly a straight forward manner to eliminate your entry in one go. Even a second entry as I had on Facebook could not be deleted. Also for the network the numbers count, so that they can ask more money for their advertisers and eventually can dictate more money when they will be acquired. No, I dump the social networks.
1288 days ago I was in Beijing, standing in front of the official count down board.When I look forward, there are some exciting trips coming up. I have been invited to Bahrain again the chair the jury of an e-Government competition. Not everything is fixed, but it will still be this month. I have an invitation to go to Ghana in August in the framework of a road show of the World Summit Awards and I really look forward to that trip. After South Africa that will be the second trip to Africa. In the autumn Finland will be on the agenda as well as Graz (Austria). By the beginning of next year we will have the World Summit 2009 Grand Jury and Gala, respectively in Venezuela (most likely) and Mexico. I am really looking forward to these events.
By July I hope that one of the edited books High Performance Multimedia will be published, at last. It is still a left over of the ACTeN project which ran from 2002 till 2004. By that same time I should have my manuscript ready of my book on the history of digital media in The Netherlands. And there is more in the planning.
But it will be also a year of sports excitement. The European soccer championships will be held in Austria and Switzerland. I am eager to see how much influence internet will have on the series. And it is still 99 days to go to the Olympic Games. I still remember that I was there. I am not sure how many days ago that was. I will have to look up the photograph of my visit to Beijing.
All in all, the new blog year promises to be a full year of events, items and issues and I will be happy to report on them.
Blog Number Posting: 1085
Tags: blog
No comments:
Post a Comment