Cross atlantic introductions

While meeting up with Ed Vielmetti at the Communities and Technologies 2007 conference, I was reminded by Ed about the confluences that he has with some of the folks back home in Singapore. This has been a post that has been waiting in the wings for far too long. And I thought that it might be appropriate to use this blog to introduce the various individuals to each other. What I will do is write a brief bio for each person and some contact details. You are all free to use the comment section on this post to communicate with each other or better yet see if more direct connections can be made.

Ed Vielmetti:

I have known Ed since 2005 when I contacted him to work on a project for Peter Morville's Information Architecture class. Back then Ed was working with Social Text and I had wanted to think about Information Architecture for social software like wikis. I have kept in touch with Ed since and have come to realize what a tremendous asset Ed is to the Ann Arbor community. Ed currently works with Pure Visibility - an Internet marketing company that specializes in Google analytics and Ad Words. Like some of the "Media socialists", Ed occupies a position within a ad/marketing/PR but is experimenting with social media and web 2.0 technologies.

However, Ed also has many other facets that may be of interest to the folks in Singapore. He's very famous for his work on his blog Superpatron where he likes to experiment and mash-up the services provided by the Ann Arbor District Library. One of his latest ideas - put the local library catalogue on facebook :) I am sure there are a couple of Singaporeans (a.k.a Rambling Librarian) who would be interested to get in touch with Ed.

Lastly, Ed also maintains a personal blog called "Vacuum" where he farms links from his delicious account and also aggregates his other 'spaces' on the Internet.

Ben Koe:

I have only recently made contact with Ben through Kevin Lim. Most of what I know about Ben comes from his blog and this is how he describes himself:
"I work at Hill & Knowlton in Singapore as a PR consultant in the technology practice as well as the company's new media specialist where I experiment marrying PR and the social media. I also co-founded and built Scoopasia.com, a free web resource for the PR and marketing industry in Asia."

Ivan Chew a.k.a Rambling Librarian:

Ivan is a librarian in the Singapore National Library board system. I am not exactly sure what his exact designation/position is, but I do know that he is one of the first librarians to maintiain a blog that explicitly details the joys and travails of his profession. I've met Ivan once, but our online paths cross each other regularly. Ivan is an avocate for expanding the traditional role of the library and enabling individuals with disabilities to access library services. There's a nice interview with Ivan that can be found on the LitMinds blog.

Kevin Lim

Kevin is a doctoral student at SUNY, Buffalo but he's more than just academics. Kevin's a real dynamo at experimenting with new technologies, evangelising about them and networking with people to spread the gospel (so to speak ;) ). Check out Kevin's blog, Theory is the reason, for the latest in his exploits with technologies, events, venues or individuals.

Apologies if I have left anyone out. But feel free to ping me if you would like to know more about the folks that I have mentioned in this post or if you would like to get in touch with anyone here.