Defining the topic for this blog has been an on-going challenge for me since I started blogging in December 2004. And that is reflected in the way my blog has evolved over the years.
Starting out as a simple way of sharing my experiences as an exchange student in Manchester in 2005, the blog evolved into [...]
Posts under ‘Social Tools’
A Primer for a sustainable future
Recently, I’ve been thinking about how we need to reinvent something like The Whole Earth Catalog.
The Whole Earth Catalog is an ancient thing. Initiated by Stewart Brand in 1968 as a response to the communard movement that followed the summer of love. During the autumn and winter of 1967/1968, more than 30.000 hippies sought to [...]
The musketeer rule
Just trawled my way through a ridiculously long slide deck by David Gillespie called “Digital Strangelove – or how I learned to stop worrying and love the internet“.
It has a lot of good points, and describes among other things:
How it doesn’t make sense to talk of digital anymore. It is a qualifier that is losing [...]
On social objects
Working at Socialsquare, I’ve been introduced to some very practical thinkers in the realm of digital sociality. These are the people who are concerned with connecting the technical ‘how’ with the social ‘how’ to build new web services that help redefine digital sociality. One of the more thoughtful of these thinkers is Jyri Engeström.
Jyri [...]
Making sense of twitter
Following my last post, where I likened Twitter to shouting out the window of a moving truck, I’ve been giving the matter some more thought and dug up some different perspectives on Twitter. Web 2.0 entrepreneur Ross Mayfield even asked his Twitter followers how they would describe Twitter to new-comers.
It’s public but focused on individuals. [...]
Dunbar’s number revisited
A while back, I made a brief reference to the so-called Dunbar number in relation to my list of friends on Facebook.
Since then, I’ve spent some time reading up on Dunbar’s number and the concept of friends on social networking sites, and feel the need to delve deeper into this discussion. danah boyd, one [...]
Internet tribes
Recently, I read Seth Godin’s new book Tribes. It is a short clever book full of insights on what it means to build and lead a tribe. Godin’s main argument is borrowed from one of Hugh McLeod’s one-liners:
Or, as Woody Guthrie put it: “Basically, man is a hoping machine.”
As a marketing guru, Godin’s spin on [...]
The Community of Practice on Communities of Practice
Some time ago, I was invited by John D Smith to present my thesis work on Ubuntu as a Community of Practice at the CP Square autumn dissertation fest. CP Square is an online community of researchers and consultants working with Communities of Practice – a term coined by Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave, and [...]
Dunbar’s number and Facebook
Recently, I made a brief reference to the so-called Dunbar number in relation to my list of friends on Facebook.
Since then, I’ve spent some time reading up on Dunbar’s number and the concept of friends on social networking sites, and feel the need to delve deeper into this discussion. danah boyd, one of the [...]
I'm an anthropologist working as an 
