Dec 31, 2006 0
Adios 2007 – Olá 2007
2006 is closing down. It sure has been exciting, yet at times a pretty bumpy ride. On a personal note, I successfully defended my Ph.D. in 2006. Got hold of the Doc title, Oh Yeahh. Finishing really felt nice, although it was a quite exhausting and somehow nerve wrecking exercise. Ending 3 intense years (and some) of work was to me very strange. I have also started on my new job, also very challenging in the best possible way, and great new colleagues to match it. Great, love it.
2007 looks to be just as exciting, however I hope a little less stressful. I’ll to continue developing the User Centred Design domain on my job, and already I looking forward to work on some interesting projects in the first months. Also I’m very excited to return to the ITU as an external lecturer. Together with Kasper “floc” Kofod , I’ll be teaching the course “Social Software design and implementation” in the spring. The course still needs a lot of framing, as it is the first time it will run, but we’ll be focusing on both theoretical perspective and try to design for social interaction.
I think it is save to say that 2006 was the year where “the new” social, democratic, user involved, driven and generated… what else… internet finally got massive traction, for better (there are a lot of new things going around) and worse (the 2.0 buzz is thickning considerably) ending in Time Magazine announcing that “you” (read: we) are the person of the year in 2006 – congrats by the way! Next year we will surely see how strong this “you, me, we” trend is, and we will start to see some of the consequences of and within the web 2.0 endeavour (it’ll need to prove that it is worthy of the attention). One major challenge, I think, will come to traditional media and corporate communication. Traditional ways of communicating, to innovate, to work etc. will become “stimulated†by the possibilities and challenges of the massive emergence of social software and personal media. A lot of this also goes into some of the interesting projects I’m involved in at work – so I’ll probably have some more insights throughout 2007. And I’m really looking forward to get to dwell into the area of “social software” together with hopefully a talented and a motivated bunch of students.
I’ll try to think more out loud in the line of this in the coming year. I promise.
Also, if anyone has some suggestion for or know of a list of mandatory or formative literature and/or central posts, case studies etc. on the whole social software web 2.0 – Please throw it in a comment or two!
Happy New Year all!
