Gnomedex Notes: Julie Leung on Blogging as a Social Tool

Julie Leung’s presentation on Blogging as a Social Tool at Gnomedex (tags: Gnomedex, purplemonkeydishwasher):

• I missed Julie’s presentation at Northern Voice (which I managed to plug at the start of the show).
• How do you protect your family while blogging? What persona do we project when we blog?
• Dave Weinberger – we are writing ourselves into existence.
• We all have masks, which we choose for different situations.
• “We are aching for the real.” We hunger for truth and transparency.
• “When we’re blogging our life, we may be breaking it.”
• Exchange intimacy for public identity.
• Why keep secrets – preservation (save your relationships – when we become public figures, whomever we put on our blog become public too), protection (set limits–tools for one’s own creativity), privacy (there’s a proper place for secrets–privacy is a commodity).
• Why blog?
• Establish a chronicle – for the family and society – blogging is a collective, collaborative autobiography. Blogs are petrie dishes that can become particle accelerators.
• Cross-pollination.
• Creativity – Discover who we are and we’re meant to do. We can see what we’re missing.
• Crisis – Blogs can help in a crisis or struggles.
• Crossroads – we discover how our lives intersect–blogging brings us together to find meaning.
• When we share something beautiful, we find hope.
• Love makes you brave, and make you do brave things.

Julie’s presentation was fantastic–so unorthodox but speaking to the truth of the attractions and power of blogging. It was extremely insightful, and an excellent counterpoint to the geekiness. It reminds everybody, I think, that technology is about humans, too.