You might have noticed that Strange Attractor has been a wee bit quiet over the last few months. There’s one simple reason for this – I’ve been living in the petri dish instead of looking through the microscope at it. A few months ago I had a call from fellow Corante contributor Ross Mayfield asking me to work with Socialtext to help increase understanding and adoption of wikis at one of their clients, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, an investment bank in London.

How could I say no? For the last couple of years, I’ve been looking at the use of social software in business from the outside, or from brief forays into the business environment, extrapolating and working from first principals. Having the opportunity to put all that to the test, to spend a good solid amount of time on site, working directly alongside the business users and IT department was just too good to pass up.

And then of course I helped co-found the Open Rights Group, a digital rights campaigning organisation based in London. With luminaries such as Cory Doctorow on our Advisory Council, it’s another great opportunity for me to work on issues that are close to my heart, such as digital privacy and access to knowledge.

So my working week has been a bit full, to say the least.

But I felt somewhat reluctant to give up Strange Attractor. I’m fond of the ol’ blog, even though there are probably only about three people who still have it in their aggregator.

What to do? What to do?

The answer came to me as I was talking to my partner Kevin Anderson one day. Kevin’s one of the people working at the BBC on blogging strategy, as well as being a producer on the World Service’s radio programme World Have Your Say, a show best described as ‘it’s like blogging, but on the radio’. He also does a podcast with Ben Metcalfe and Paul Sissons called Talking Shop. So we’re talking about blogging, and journalism, and how the two can peacefully co-exist and it strikes me that Kevin has a lot to say, but nowhere to say it. I, on the other hand, have somewhere to say stuff but not enough time to say it.

I see a neat little solution to both our problems here.

Thus I would like to welcome Kevin Anderson to Strange Attractor. Kev will be talking about the intersections between mainstream media, citizen journalism, blogging, and anything else that strikes his fancy. I’m going to carry on blogging about blogging, and whatever else I feel like. Sometimes our threads might overlap, but between us, hopefully, we’ll manage to update Strange Attractor more than once a month.