Blogging Blog

Bloggers Unite

Join 1,000s of Bloggers Today, September 27th & Blog Against Abuse.

* Animal Abuse
* Domestic Abuse
* Child Abuse
* Political Abuse  & more....

It's not too late to join in. The Blog Catalog discussion group is here. You will find lots of links there to the contributions of other bloggers.

Cool Avatars & Network Aggregation Profiles: mEgo

I'm going to review a few of these over the next couple of weeks, because they're fun. I had planned to start with profilebuilder, but woke this morning to find many hits on Watermark from mEgo, which linked to me (and several others) on its homepage. So I will begin with this, which is my favorite anyway.

Here is a quick sample, collected from browsing on the home page, of the range of visual possibilities this offers:

The actual flash versions are animated, and interactive. The buttons take you to content selected by the user.

mEgo was created with the mission to make managing and sharing your online selves a more coherent, fun and useful experience...

Think of your mEgo as having two parts:

• A physical body and background that you design
• and
• Customizable content (consisting of polls, feeds & profile data) that is categorized and linked to "hot spots" on your mEgo's body.

When you are creating your mEgo, you use the Looks editor to design the appearance of your mEgo. You can change your look as often as you want. You can also upload your own pictures, edit them with our Crop & Style photo editing tool and modify other background settings.

You then use the Feed and Content editors to further customize your mEgo with your own personal data.

This is probably not appropriate for use on a professional or business webpage -- unless you happen to be a professional creative -- but it seems ideal for a personal weblog. This one also works on MySpace, which I gather is picky about these things.

Pros:

• Fun, attractive, and very customizable.
• Inspires creativity -- a real opportunity to think about and express yourself.
• A lot of content in a small space.

Cons:

• This is beta. Beta = buggy. I had a hard time getting the home page to load today; and when it did load, it was slow, and/or crashed my browser. Perhaps they have been more successful than anticipated, and are overloaded.
• Not visible to those who disable flash.

I had a lot of fun making mine, which you can see below the cut:

   

One Web Day | One Small World

Today is OneWebDay 

The Web is worth celebrating.

OneWebDay is one day a year when we all - everyone around the physical globe - can celebrate the Web and what it means to us as individuals, organizations, and communities.

There are days, in these difficult times, when I feel there is little hope for us, as a species on this world we sometimes seem bent on destroying. On those days, what hope I find is here, on the Web; in the connections we make as individuals, one to another.

The Web has a lot to offer that is informative, or beautiful, or trivial and disturbing. For me, the heart of the Web is the personal blogs, where we each offer something of ourselves to each other. Now, when war or disaster strikes in some other part of the world, I am likely to think -- to feel -- I know someone who lives there.

Because we do grow to know each other, in a new and uncertain sense.  This knowing is a reminder, an awareness, of how small our world is; how connected we really are. That the bell -- be it funeral bell, celebration bell, or alarm bell -- tolls for us all.

Ideas like this should be more often shared, especially nowadays when the world seems to be in need of dialogue and understanding among different cultures, in a way that it has never been before.

Click that Miniature Earth graphic to go see a short, powerful movie --  one of the jewels our Web has to offer. 

If our world still seems large to you, go look at The Size Of Our World.

We are so small, to hold so much.

If your blog were a building. . .

...what kind of building would it be?

• An office, a factory, a shop?
• A house, an apartment, a farmhouse?
• A palace, a shack, a chicken coop?
• Perhaps a workshop, a crafting room, a studio?
• Or even a garden, a park, a forest?

There was a time when we thought of websites as places; places where we would spend some time, wandering about and exploring. As a proud elder blogger, I was around during that time, and my site designs reflect that.

Now we seem to think of websites more like billboards -- something we must grasp quickly as we drive by. A website must grab our attention immediately, above the fold, because we won't stay long.

As personal bloggers, or keepers of online diaries and journals, we can ignore some of this advice. We can make our online space our home space, with the comforts and entertainments we like to offer our guests (and ourselves.)

I think . . .