In the UK, a certain Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution said recently that she found it strange we are “enthusiastically embracing” the possible erosion of our identity through social networking sites, since those that use such sites can lose a sense of where they themselves “finish and the outside world begins”.

From my perspective this is a very odd point of view. My online identity and my offline identity are the same. And it didn’t happen gradually. My online identity didn’t mysteriously eat, digest and transform my offline identity. I enthusiastically took my offline identity online, to meet new people and to be more readily available for my existing friends. My conversations on the web are as real as the ones I am having taking a walk with my best friend, or talking with my wife and kids over dinner. Furthermore, if anything I’d like to think of my online life as an identity preserver rather than an identity eraser.

This is my great-grandfather. I have a few pictures of him, but I hardly know anything about him. He was born in 1910 and he died in 1971. I was born in 1971 and I never got a chance to meet him.

He worked as a bicycle repairman. When he was young he was a pretty good boxer and everyone says he was a very decent guy. My great-grandmother died when I was 25, but we never really spoke about him, and whenever I discussed my great-grandfather with my late grandmother, she always basically repeated the same three things: “He worked as a bicycle repairman, when he was young he was a pretty good boxer and everybody thought he was a decent guy.”

My family were never big on words. My grandparents are simple people, very kind, warm and loving, but they didn’t tell stories and they were always a bit uncomfortable when I wanted to know what life was like “in the old days.”

It’s a pity my great-grandfather wasn’t on Twitter. I would have loved to know some of the everyday things about him that are so prevalent on Twitter. I would have loved to know his immediate thoughts when German forces entered Norway in 1940, what kind of music he enjoyed in 1955 or if he enjoyed his work at all.

For me, Twitter is a diary on steroids. Well, sort of. It’s not a very powerful tool to analyze anything in itself and I certainly want to keep some of my thoughts to myself. But over time all these small messages will give people a pretty good impression of who I am — they will reflect my interests, my routines, my dreams and my fears in life.

The steroid part of it is the fact that my thoughts and actions may instantly spark an interesting conversation with another person on the other side of the globe. Is Twitter, as some cantankerous critics say, a tool to remind members of an insecure generation that they exist? Of course it isn’t. For some people it is. For other people it is something else entirely.

For me, Twitter and social media isn’t about self-promotion or exhibitionism at all. Quite to the contrary, I’m a private person who loathes when I’m in the spotlight. I don’t like to talk about myself with other people.

I do, however, like to talk about my ideas with other people. I like to share my thoughts and my interests, and I like to engage in conversations about them. I do it in real life with my friends, my family, and my colleagues, and now I can do it online with people I don’t even know, and I think that my life is all the richer for it.

And I really enjoy the prospect of my blog and my 75-year-old Twitter-stream being available for my great-grandchildren to read in 2082. Really, Twitter should offer an export button. Maybe there’s a certain amount of self-preservational vanity in that notion, but there is also the longing I have always felt to know more about my ancestors. It’s only been a couple of generations, and apart from the pictures, my great-grandfather’s life has been reduced to three things: Bicycle repairman, boxer, decent. Obviously, this is but a fraction of what my great-grandfather was about.

Regardless of the future of Twitter, Robert Scoble claiming it’s broken and all, I love the fact that people, regular people with ordinary lives, have started documenting themselves and their lives for anyone to see — on Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, on blogs and on any other social media platform that exist.

I know more about Stephen Fry than I know about my great-grandfather. Hopefully my great-grandchildren will know more about me than they will know about Britney Spears’ granddaughter.

Yes, yes, I know. Fat chance.

Anyway, if you want to, you can help me lose sense of myself, prove Lady Greenfield right or convince my great-grandchildren I was incredibly popular in 2009 by following me on Twitter. See you around.

Robert Scoble is the kid up the street with all the answers. You know, the kid with ALL the Commodore 64 games, a gigantic Lego model railroad in the basement and whose father apparently owns a flying Citroen CX? I’m pretty sure that’s him.

Well, this kid is all grown-up now, and he’s on the web. And, as in childhood, once you learn to filter the bullshit from the actual content the guy is a real treasure.

He’s a pioneer blogger, a tech guru, a social media evangelist - and quite possibly the #1 human link aggregator on the web. He introduced me to Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Friend Feed and probably a dozen other more or less meaningful services on the web at an early stage in their development - heck, I even think it was Scoble who introduced me to the concept of RSS feeds.

I’m not a tech guy, but thanks to Robert Scoble I have practically turned into the prototype early adopter on the web (yeah, right.)

He’s extremely extrovert on the web, he’s opinionated as hell and he shoots from the hip. His writing is temperamental and personal, he’s potentially ill-tempered but usually enthusiastic, even ecstatic over some new development.

It’s easy for a non-tech guy like me to enjoy his rants and share his enthusiasm for what is, let’s face it, some seriously geeky stuff.

He makes friends easily - it’s one of his main concerns regarding Facebook: The 5,000 friend limit, which he exceeded months ago (I hear you! I’m rapidly approaching that limit myself - getting close to 40 now!) He has a huge following, one of the original "A-bloggers" - me plugging him is, like, Caveman Eremite in the Desert plugging the New York Times. It seems as if he’s making enemies just as easily as he’s making friends, though.

But he’s a very entertaining guy, he’s working his ass off bringing us the latest from Silicon Valley or wherever all these tech startups pop up. And nobody hits that j-button more than Scoble. Yeah, I know. You probably don’t have a clue as to what I’m talking about.

Be that as it may, if you want to know when the next Facebook arrives or maybe just add a little tech, controversy and flavor to your rss feed, Scoble’s your guy.

I should write him a song - that would definitely get my stats up.

Just wanted to put in a good word for Particls, a brilliant free, open standards based app I discovered recently that instantly tracks your favorite sites and topics. It’s kind of like a filtered feed reader.

It’s very easy to set up. Install it, enter a few keywords to indicate your fields of interest and you’re ready to start.

I fed it with some music related words - favorite artists, music industry references such as ASCAP, BMI, DRM, record companies etc., eMusic, iTunes and so on - and I’ve been spending the entire evening reading interesting, highly relevant articles from a seemingly endless array of sources.

In addition you can add your regular rss feeds, and perform a number of tweaks to improve your news stream. But I’m thoroughly impressed with its performance even though I haven’t tweaked it at all.

You can sort your news stream by date or by relevancy. I immediately fell in love with the relevancy sorting option. In the future, I’ll probably use Particls for keyword searches, sorted by relevancy - and continue using Google Reader for my regular feeds, sorted by date.

Highly recommended!

I wrote earlier about my MySpace allergy. Facebook is not all that different, but it appeals much more to me.

I created a Facebook account about a month ago just to see what it was about. I only spent a couple of minutes trying out some of the features. Then on Monday, a music blog friend had signed up, he discovered my account and invited me to be his friend.

Inspired by his invitation I started to experiment a bit with the site, and I think it could be quite useful. It has a nice, clean interface. You can upload as many photos as you wish, write notes, tell your friends what you’re doing at the moment and not least you decide who has access to that information as opposed to MySpace.

It’s a great little page if you want to share a little of your life with distant friends or relatives. They can visit my page and learn about trivialities in my life - that I’m listening to Leonard Cohen or working out or something… that is, if I keep on updating the page…

I’m not sure I’ll keep it up, but at the moment it’s quite amusing. Now, if I could only get some of my friends or relatives to sign up to the damn thing.

The networking options are very U.S.-dominant at the moment, but I guess they’ll expand it as the service gains popularity in other countries.

It really doesn’t take much more than 5 minutes to set up a blog, and it’s so easy that your mom can do it.

It occured to me when I discussed blogging with a colleague yesterday that, surprising as it may seem, most people still don’t have blogs. He’s very competent on computers, yet he didn’t know how to go about setting up a blog (because he never tried to), so I explained the basics to him. I thought I’d might as well do the same for you.

Here are the instructions to set up a blog using Google’s Blogger service step by step:

1. Enter blogger.com. Click the orange arrow to “Create your blog now”.

2. Create a Google account by filling out your e-mail address, choosing a password and a name. Click “Continue”.
3. Choose a title for your blog and enter an address. Click “Continue”.
4. Choose a template you like. You can change it at any time. Click “Continue”.
5. Your blog is created. Click “Start posting”.
6. Choose a title, write a text, label it with a few keywords. Click “Publish”.
7. Click “View Blog”. This is your finished blog. You’re done!

It’s actually pretty self-explanatory when you enter the Blogger site.

But if you’ve never tried to create a blog before, you may (like me) have reckoned that setting up a blog requires advanced programming and web design skills or something. Not so! Easiest thing in the world.

So now there’s no excuse. Head on over to blogger.com and start writing today! Wordpress is another alternative, it’s just as easy…

I don’t get MySpace. Not all that happens on the web is equally innovative and mindblowing - and MySpace is a glorious yet sad manifestation of that fact.

The ugly layout is one thing; it’s giving me a headache just to think about it. It’s in so bad taste - is that what people actually like? Dancing gnomes, twinkling stars in purple, orange and cyan over a red Corvette?

And really, what’s the point? People “just saying hi” and “what’s up”? Are there some hidden communication channels on the page that I’m not aware of? Or is what you see all there’s to it? “Thanks for the add, mate. See ya?” Is that it?

I’ve tried to get into MySpace a little bit, but it’s such a waste of time. It’s like meeting people at a disco, yelling at each other over the loud music. In the end you just give up, standing opposite each other trying to look cool, nodding to the rhythm, smiling, realizing you’ll never be able to start a meaningful dialogue.

You have to get out of there to start making sense. I don’t like discos much - I haven’t been to one in a decade, and I’m beginning to feel the same way about MySpace.

I don’t like dancing, I don’t like yelling, I don’t like reggae (I love it).

No, seriously, I love to meet people on the web, but there are so many arenas where you can discuss real content and meet interesting people with actual thoughts. Thank God. So I guess I’ll just leave MySpace to the masses and continue doing my own little thing, whatever that is…

I wrote about Carl Bildt’s blog yesterday. There are so many beautiful things going on on the internet these days. For those of us who are able to participate in the 2.0 experience, it’s a brand new reality where the rules of the old world are challenged constantly.

The power of the traditional media is in decline, and that’s certainly a good thing. People watch less television, and organize their feeds so that they don’t need to expose themselves to Britney Spears’ new hairstyle or endless chronicles on Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.

If you’re interested in politics you can get your information from just about any source you can possibly think of: Newspapers, blogs, official or unofficial sources, left-wing, right-wing, personal, organizational, biased or unbiased, objective or subjective. You choose.

More and more music freaks turn their back on the infinite greed and less-than-serviceminded attitude of the established music industry, turning instead to such fine websites as eMusic and Amie Street.

Musicians communicate directly with their fans on MySpace, amateur musicians collaborate on online projects.

It is a social revolution, and it’s upsetting to parts of the establishment. I can’t help it, but I’m amused and delighted to see the music industry, large broadcasting companies and journalists shaking in their pants.

They thought they had it all worked out, and in so many ways they’d all grown into arrogant, dogmatic relics from the past. Change is forcing itself upon them though Rejoyce!

Give it up for mr. Carl Bildt, Sweden’s Foreign Minister. He’s keeping a blog on Wordpress, and it’s a real, proper blog/diary where he rants much like the rest of us about this and that, but also offer insightful and exciting glimpses into the world of international politics.

Swedish journalists aren’t entirely happy with his project, but he answers to their criticism in his blog and is clearly up for the fight.

To me, reading this man’s blog is a euphoric experience. It’s nowhere near the usual smooth and rather simplistic political rhetoric. His words and thoughts are 100% real, I believe, and it’s refreshing to see a politician in such an open, care-free and unofficial context. This is the way of the future. Way to go, mr. Bildt!

Is Saturday a lousy day for blogging? Just wondering, ’cause I regularly have +/- 15 viewers a day on weekdays by now, yet on Saturday they all disappear. Today I had 0 hits!

I actually thought that my blog would perform better during weekends than on weekdays, as it’s nowhere near work-related in any possible way. But it seems that I still get most of my hits during office hours.

I’m a little surprised. Don’t people surf at home?

Mine’s worth $2.17

I guess it will probably take some time for me to make $1,000 per day yet…

Check out the value of your blog here.