Starting out as a simple way of sharing my experiences as an exchange student in Manchester in 2005, the blog evolved into a more solid online presence, eventually hosting the observations and ideas gathered throughout my fieldwork and thesis writing.

Following my graduation, I redefined my blog as my outboard brain, borrowing an expression from Cory Doctorow, a random stream of whatever caught my interest or my fancy at any given time.

Once I began working at Socialsquare, much of my blogging was diverted to their blog, and my own blog saw only sporadic posting.

Now that I’ve started out on my own, I find it is time to define the topic of this blog anew, and much more clearly this time. Inspired by Josh Porter’s advice on small-company blogs I’ll focus on the fields in which I work, and on how the developments in these fields can make a difference.

I work at the intersection of two fields: social software and people-centred design.

Social software is the fuzzy field sometimes known as social media, social tools, or lately even social business. Fundamentally, it is software tools and services on computers or mobile devices that support social relations, sharing, collaboration and collective action.

People-centered design is a strain within another fuzzy field often called user experience design, design research, user-centered design or even user-driven innovation. But all of these strains still draw upon the same mother lode: The notion that it is vital to understand understand the practices, motivations and needs of the potential users in order to design new products and services that can offer lasting value.

What both of these fields have in common is the fact that they are opening up new avenues of user involvement in their own way:

Social software facilitates involvement by offering people tools to share, discuss and solve issues – either directly among one another or indirectly by engaging with an organisation dedicated to solving those issues.

People-centred design creates involvement by engaging with people in their everyday lives, exploring and analysing the issues they face and building on those experiences in design solutions.

So, to sum up: I write about user involvement through people-centered design and social software. Stay tuned for more.

The world is fucked, kids. You know it. You’ve seen it. If you are basically anyone other than a thin able-bodied white dude who likes the ladies and makes truckloads of cash, a substantial portion of the world is convinced that you just do not matter. Wishing aloud that the world catered more specifically to your personal wishes and desires… well, that’s not how it works. It’s missing the point, actually. Because the point is not, and never has been, you. The point is everybody. So you get up every morning, and you put on your armor, and you make things change.

Yes!

As usual, I’ll give a quick summary of the best concerts I attended this year. I’ve done this for the past few years that I have been blogging and attending the festival. But this year, it doesn’t seem quite as relevant to do so. I have been neglecting blogging for quite a while now. It takes a lot of time, which I don’t seem to have these days. And I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated at my own blog posts whenever I do blog: Blogging doesn’t seem to be improving my writing.

I enjoy writing, but lately I’ve found that the way I blog isn’t too conducive to producing high quality prose. Usually, it’s just first drafts, idle thoughts quickly jotted down and published straight away, thus avoiding the careful re-reading, editing, and re-writing that the well-composed essays that I’d like to write require.

But there is another element as to why I haven’t been blogging, and Roskilde Festival is a great example of this: Coming back from the festival, I can see how others already have posted their favourite concerts on Twitter or Facebook, summing up their feelings in short status updates as the concerts were happening. Blogging about it, even just the day after the event seems late and out of context.

So, in my mind, I’ve been changing the focus of this blog a fair bit. Here, I won’t be competing with the real time tweets and status updates. Here, I will place the more detailed status updates from my outboard brain. For my memory and your inspiration. In addition, I will attempt to experiment a bit thoroughly with tweeting, having realized that I might just as well turn my annual Roskilde post into a series of tweets:

andreaslloydMy #rf09 5 best: Magnifico – Slovenian pop wrapped in golden chains and brass horns. Very dansant. http://ping.fm/4BbyH

My #rf09 best: Jenny Wilson – Chantreuse igniting the audience with empathic and mature uncanned R’n'B. http://ping.fm/BYK0w

My #rf09 best: Analogik – late, late night show of complex beats magicking us away to a hidden balkan sailor’s dive. http://ping.fm/1RQkn

My #rf09 best: Malk De Koijn – rhyming to wrap the Danish language inside out: “De er bare kommet for at fyre den konge af.” http://ping.fm/qaolx

My #rf09 best: The Whitest Boy Alive – dance music, beautiful and unimposing in a very Scandinavian way. http://ping.fm/DNYca

There. How does that look?

I’ve also set a permanent 301 .htaccess redirect, updated my RSS feed with Feedburner (now, when did Google acquire them?), Technorati and – hopefully – mumbled all the words of relevant ritual incantations correctly (Klaatu, Verata, Nectarine… right?), so nobody will lose their way trying to catch up on the latest ponderings from this blog. But if you have had troubles, please do let me know so I can fix it.

As I am wont to do, I’ve spent quite a bit of time considering what the name of my domain should be. And in the end, I ended up with my boring ol’ name. Why? Well, mostly because it’s a name that I’m not very likely to change. I also considered renaming the blog (and updating the theme and all that jazz) to celebrate the new domain – but really, I can’t be bothered right now.

Imagine a large group of rednecks, each of them cruising down a broad highway in their pickup trucks. They’re in constant flow, constantly on the move. All of the rednecks are shouting out the window as they go. Typically letting the world know what they’re doing, but often also pointing out things that they’re passing by. At times, two cars are side by side, and the rednecks can holler at each other as they drive by. Such shout-versations rarely lasts longer than a few exchanges.

Now, the really odd thing is that each pickup truck has a microphone installed. But it only records the exclamations of the driver inside the car, not what the other drivers are saying. That means that you find a driver whose yelling seems exceptionally poignant to you, you will still have a hard time figuring out exactly what they’re going on about when they’re shouting replies to others. Your best chance is to listen in on a lot of people to get both sides of the conversation.

Twitter is sort of the redneck version of weblogs. It’s drive-by shouting online. It’s short and fast and furious and fragmented and mostly incoherent. I don’t doubt that it works. It’s obviously quite an effective way to let people know what you think. But it’s still shouting.

I don’t really expect that this realization will have much influence on this blog. I guess I like it that way. It does mean that I’ll never be able to attract huge numbers of readers, since what catches my interest seems to be rather diverse. It’s more a confirmation of the direction of that I’ve been heading so far: This blog reflects whatever I’m thinking about – for my benefit, and hopefully for at least a few others as well.

As you can see, they’re aggregating content from some of the various web 2.0 services I’m using, including my brand new 23 photo sharing account and my link sharing account at del.icio.us.

It’s all about striking a good balance making the content attractive without overburdening the site with information.

As a start, I’ve added some books that I’ve read to my shelf – my virtual book collection, that is. I’ve also added a shelf called Recommendations, which contains a number of books that I’ve learned a lot from, and which – to some extent – have shaped my way of thinking. It is obviously incomplete, but I’ll be adding more to it as I go along – and maybe I’ll even get as far as writing a few lines as to why these books are so important.

Since starting my profile, I’ve been trying to keep it updated as I read new books, adding a rating and few lines on each to make it easy for me to remember them, and easy for others to get an idea of whether it’s something they should pay attention to or not.

Now, all I need to do is engage my friends and family in sharing their favourite reads with me, so that all of my recommendations can actually do some good, and I can get some recommendations in return.
I’ve been so bold as to invite some of you to go get a profile on Goodreads, which I hope you’ll do, so you can let me know what you’re reading these days!

I also spent some time updating the About, Writings, and Best of… pages to make it as easy as possible to find your way around the site. So take a few minutes to explore, and feel free to comment on the new look.

I have also unsubscribed my blog from Planet Ubuntu. I don’t know if this will be a final thing, but since I won’t be blogging directly about Ubuntu for a while, I think it’s the proper thing to do (and besides, I’m having issues with my new feedburner feed…).

I finally got around to doing this when I read usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s top 10 weblog design mistakes, and I hope to have fixed most his concerns now. The only ones I won’t be able to fix by switching blogging software is his points on content:

7. Irregular Publishing Frequency

Establishing and meeting user expectations is one of the fundamental principles of Web usability. For a weblog, users must be able to anticipate when and how often updates will occur.

8. Mixing Topics

If you publish on many different topics, you’re less likely to attract a loyal audience of high-value users. Busy people might visit a blog to read an entry about a topic that interests them. They’re unlikely to return, however, if their target topic appears only sporadically among a massive range of postings on other topics. The only people who read everything are those with too much time on their hands (a low-value demographic).The more focused your content, the more focused your readers. That, again, makes you more influential within your niche. Specialized sites rule the Web, so aim tightly.

If you have the urge to speak out on, say, both American foreign policy and the business strategy of Internet telephony, establish two blogs. You can always interlink them when appropriate.

Eh. Guilty. But somehow I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Just having one blog is plenty of bother for me already.
Anyway, I hope all of this works, and that it won’t mess things up for anybody reading this off a RSS feed.