Yes, as Nancy and Bee said, the introductions do get a bit stale.  Skimming through the mini bios, composing my own and wondering how it comes across (well, I’m much less eminent than most of the group so I would feel rather small in comparison).

Charles Cameron’s Hipbone game seemed like a brilliant idea but was hard to put into practice in the forum as there was so much going on.  It didn’t really work for me, I’ve lost touch with the people on my connection grid.

I think a concrete group task with a small group (four or five people) might have been better for our needs.  Maybe the first week we could be grouped randomly with each group given a name (e.g. signs of the zodiac) . In week 2 we could be obliged to join a group (e.g. colours: red, orange, etc.) that has nobody else from our zodiac group.  It’d work like this:

• OK so I land in the aries group in the first week (birthday at the end of March).  What could the task be?  Well how about jumping in with one of the new tools, say twitter, and ask us to write a collaborative story (e.g. the imaginary diary of someone, maybe a famous person? ), line by line, in twitter.
• In week 2 I look for a colour group that has no aries members.  I join the turquiose group.  We show each other the fake diaries we wrote with twitter and discuss.  Our own task for this week could be to join Flickr, decide on a theme for our turquoise pictures (e.g. we decide to choose age as our theme and I put up a photo of an old man playing with a puppy) and post them, linking to the turquoise group members as contacts.

and so on.

Just a thought, using a tried and tested EFL technique.  I think having a concrete and relatively simple task to do with a group makes us feel secure and gives us a framework to get to know each other in.   The task of looking at ALL the other blogs is rather overwhelming (luckily the opml file doesn’t seem to have one for all participants).