Why have a blog if I'm not going to write on it? Good question - maybe it's a place to post a few photos. My life is plenty full without writing on this Blog or updating my status on Facebook but leaving a digital footprint on the web seems to be "the thing" to do.
Perhaps I should use this place to share ideas I have about ways to improve life or our world? But an improvement to me might be considered regression to someone else - it's amazing how differently two people can look at the same issue or action.
Take this online world as an example. Google has made it unbelievable easy to post our thoughts, pictures and even videos. Facebook has a powerful networking tool to connect people. Microsoft is trying to catch the wave but it seems like they don't understand how the average person does things. I've run across this at work in the past couple of years with their SharePoint product. If you've used the product "out of the box" you probably agree that it does a lot of things but it's certainly not intuitive to use. Our corporate office has made a huge commitment to use the SharePoint technologies so I'll probably be "forced" to use them more and possibly adopt them for our own company. But when I was looking for SharePoint alternatives a stumbled on a company called Mindtouch. They are an emerging privately owned company that offers a product called "Deki". I've used the free version called Deki Express and think it's a wonderful tool and will probably starting using it as my blog space in the future.
Why use something other than Facebook or Blogspot? I think each one meets a different need. The deki gives a nice balance of public, semi-private and private information. I've started one for our church to supplement our current website bethelzeeland.wik.is and I plan to start one for our neighborhood instead of developing a website with traditional tools.
More on this in the future, but for now I'd suggest you check out www.mindtouch.com "MindTouch Deki is an open source enterprise collaboration and community platform that enables users to connect and remix enterprise systems, social tools and web services."
