Gijs van Dam

This is a new blog and as of today, the 14th of March 2011, I will confide my thoughts on the Social Web to the internets. Not because someone is waiting for it, but because I would like to share them with people and because I was not able to do so anywhere else. Besides that, my ideas are highly likely to evolve and my opinions are work in progress, so I hope that the discussions on this blog with those who apparently were waiting just a little bit on what I had to report will compel me to review my ideas.

To a certain extent this blog also arose from dissatisfaction with the reporting on the Social Web in general. It's often too shallow for my taste. There's more to the Social Web than the number of members or the valuation of a Social Network. By saying that I'm creating high expectations and it remains to be seen if I can do any better.

I will try to be more profound in particular on the following three subjects:

• The functionality of the current Social Networks
• The privacy issues of the Social Web
• The history of the Social Web

With those three subjects, and whatever comes in between, I will try to present the image that I currently have of the Social Web, namely not that it's bad, but that it could be so much better.