Barely up and running, but boy is it good to get started. I have been working on this project which has been 6 months or more in the making, so it is an absolute pleasure to quietly put out to sea. Curious to see how people respond beyond the initial teething troubles from small bugs here and there. What is it? It’s a social network for people working inside public services. No it’s not got reviews of bands and people playing music, with crazy photos of teenagers pozing in the mirror with a 45 degree facial close up shot. It’s where people working in public services go to hang out and find each other, where they can let off some steam, and share war stories, and of course, find new solutions to fix the problems they face each day caused by bureaucracy (amongst other things) while serving the public. This is a dutch-language and dutch centered service for those of you from outside the Netherlands.

Welcome to the world of BeroepsEer!(translates to working pride in your particular craft)

What it includes for those hungry for the functionality laundry list is:
- profiles
- groups
- events
- blogging (individual, groups, everyone)
- video blog (send us your uploaded video interviews/opinions on your perspective)
- presentation of discussion, people, groups, institutions over location (googlemaps)

did i miss anything?…probably…also we did not build messenging in the first version which is a sort of standard social networking functionality for people to talk with each other inside the network.

Saw an interesting talk by Matt Bidulph at Mediamatic the other night. He presented his latest work for Nature and an overview of how fabrication technologies are easy to experiment with in the virtual universe of Second Life. He was able to take the dataset of a cell tomagraph and get Second Life’s replicator bot to print a huge version of the cell image allowing people on Nature’s Second Life island to walk around it.

This tied in with a BBC feature on a IBM researcher who found a way to connect a doorbell in Second Life ringing, into sending the owner of that door an SMS message to tell them someone was calling.