Is it all vanity?

Over the last few months I've found that I was being asked quite frequently for examples of my various verbal outpourings, and being naturally disorganised, was spending silly amounts of time scanning in pages from dog-eared copies of the FT or various magazines and emailing them off. Then I thought why not put all this stuff together on a personal site? Much more sensible.

So it came to pass that lizbolshaw.com was born. It's unavoidably self, self, self and writing about yourself in the third person is somehow cringe-making, but on the other hand at least now people can drop in and find my various musings on Web 2.0, interviews with entrepreneurs and even a rather surreal piece on extravagant treehouses.

It comes as I succumb to Twitter and connect with old friends on FaceBook and generally paddle in the shallows of social media. All this mental junk food gives one a hunger for a bit of Proust or Foucault to chew on.

Death of the Word

If you haven't read it and aren't yet sick of all things social media, Throwing Sheep into the Boardroom is a good place to get your head around the roots and branches of this explosive tree. Author Matthew Fraser is an academic at Insead and has one of those highly polished domed foreheads Victorian phrenologists would have loved. I'd also recommend his blog. His latest post about the demise of newspapers and more serious magazines isn't original but it's a useful summary of where things are.

We're about two weeks' in to the launch of digital magazine, Smart People. It's very American in that loud yet improving sense and on current form won't be getting my $25 sub, but it's good to see people getting together to launch digital, interactive alternatives to newspapers. Richard Addis, who knows a bit about newspapers, has been arguing for digital innovation in news for some time, while he goes round the world relaunching papers of the traditional kind. I'm a firm fan of la Huffington whose digital organ continues to do what it does better than the competition.