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Akoha and Fighting For The Personal Touch Online

Have we lost the Human factor online (and no I’m not talking about the Evil of the Daleks, but if anyone in Zimbabwe would care to look for the tapes…)? Two discrete data points today and an experience from my time in the US leads me to think that the next big change online could not be in how we relate to data, but how we relate to people.

The first point, and one I can link to, is CC Chapman asking where all the personal blog posts have gone:

I’ve had to change how I blog a little bit. As more people began reading my ramblings I couldn’t be AS honest as I had always been because I realized the reach of a simple post was greater then before so I had to at least think about what I was saying a bit before writing it.

And it’s true. I always joke about the rant I had over Le Web 2006 – the biggest thing to come out of that was my Mum phoning me on realising just how angry I was. My only thought was “my Mum is reading my blog,” and we can all recall that moment in our lives. By living so much online, and knowing that prospective employees and partners (both business and personal) can read everything people post , this means that we become a little more clinical in our blog posts.

To be honest that’s where sites like LiveJournal and the pay-wall wrapped social network sites provide a relief valve to many of us, including myself. To a certain extent Twitter allows emotional leakage, but those of us who work online have taken a slight step backwards from putting everything on show.

It also means there’s less spontaneity in a group of friends – partly because we are all so distributed around the world and that means there’s an increased barrier to actually doing something physical rather than say send an e-gift of flowers over Facebook.

Conversely, as someone pointed out to me via IM today, that means when someone does do something, it’s seen as being extra special because we’ve got out of the habit of using this thing called snail mail for parcels.

So if you’re looking for some ideas to take forward into 2009 and perhaps make a start-up out of them, may I suggest that you look at the human side of the internet and try to magnify that area of our lives.

Oh and that experience from America that could be one such company? Akoha. More on that tomorrow (just subscribe to the RSS Feed and you won’t miss it).

April 7, 2009; Family, Personal Posts, Twitter, Web 2.0 (Observations);

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