ReadWriteWeb

Joshua Baer (@joshuabaer), founder of OtherInbox, was nice enough to sit down with us this weekend at SXSW Interactive and go over what's new with his company's product. OtherInbox was developed out of a need to intelligently manage the rest of your mail. That is to say, the mail that you might get from mailing lists, shopping sites, and other services but may not actually be from another human. We all get this mail, and to a greater or lesser extent have developed strategies to manage it, but OtherInbox provides a comprehensive and stylish solution. The big news is that the core service is now free of cost.

I'm currently updating my 'About Me' page, so that it reflects my 2004 goals and themes that I'll be exploring this year. I've got the draft sitting on my brand new Palm Tungsten T2, which Father Christmas bought me. Now I'm wondering whether to publish a photo of myself...if I can even find a decent one. I think it does help to put a face to bloggers we read on a regular basis. For me it's not for social Friendster-like reasons (although those are valid reasons for lots of people), but to build trust in someone's writing by humanizing it. Like how computer magazines have pictures of their columnists - e.g. Jon Udell and Steve Gillmor - in order to put a human face to the technical content.

The other day I saw a picture of a techy blogger who I've been reading for a few months now, but up till then I'd never seen what he looked like. His picture was totally different to what I had perceived him to look like in my mind's eye. Actually he looked a lot cooler than what I thought he would :-)

So with all this talk of social software going round, I'm curious what the differences are between one's weblog interface (a virtual avatar if you like) and one's human 'real life' interface?

Let's start with an informal survey. What do you think I look like in real life? If you were to construct a human avatar of my weblog, what would he look like to you? Please don't be shy, click the Comment button right below this sentence and don't hold back ;-)