microblogging
Practising what I preach
POSTED IN blogging, del.icio.us, good practice, microblogging, social media, twitter | TAGS : crossposting, del.icio.us, noise, site news, social media, twitter, wordpress 10 July 2008
Prompted by Mark Steadman‘s comment on one of my many blog posts on the evils of crossposting, I’ve turned off the tweet digests that were (to be honest) overwhelming the nonsense blog of mine that is /ramblings.
Mark said:
“What’s your opinion then of WordPress plugins – like the ones on your own site – that post a digest of your Twitter and del.icio.us activity each day? Thankfully you’re not the kind of guy to tweet that stuff, but isn’t that just the same kind of cross-posting?”
With delicious digests or link dumps I can see added value; the posts give time based (and theme based when you’ve been surfing around a subject) context. This can mean that they mean more when posted to a blog rather than as separate links.
That said if a blog does nothing but republish delicious links then it’s worthless.
The delicious feeds and links that you see on this site are carefully (as much as one does) chosen to be in context — and aren’t by any means everything I save. You could subscribe to my entire delicious feed, but unless you’re my mother or my psychiatrist I think you’d be bored (and my mother would be bored anyway). I wouldn’t advise anyone to subscribe to my delicious feed en masse — I use it for a wide variety of destinations (as well as to store links for myself); things tagged “work” come here, those tagged “birminghamuk” go to BiNS, I occasionally do link collections on a subject, and others links go to other places too. It’s just a mash of my surfing mind, not useful to others.
As for the Twitter digests posts, I can see the point of a post (for your own records as much as anything) but it needs to be carefully positioned so as not to swap the point of your blog. Of course I first set it up “because I could”, I don’t think I would these days if I hadn’t already.
In fact, I’ve turned it off and switched to archiving to my email, thanks Mark for making me think about that.
Crossposting, more people are coming round
POSTED IN good practice, microblogging, twitter | TAGS : crossposting, lifestream, microblogging, morals, noise, social media 2 July 2008
Ariel Waldman on crossposting with social media:
Recently, there has been a rash of one-size-fits-all services that aim to provide a solution to “managing” various sites like Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Jaiku and Facebook all at once. As with most of my rants, they begin on Twitter and then trickle their way into a blog post – and if you’ve seen some of my tweets, you have seen my personal distaste for these services and the people who use them.
Like me, she sees it a spammy, rude and a little needy. More people are making this moral choice to talk only when they’ve got something to say — which can only be a good thing.
Hat duly tipped to Stowe Boyd, who’s in agreement.
Tweet the vote
POSTED IN microblogging, social media, twitter | TAGS : birminghamuk, microblogging, politics, twitter 2 May 2008
Birmingham City Council progressively decided that they would livestream their local election results, which was more of an invitation than us politically-interested twitters needed to provide a ‘backchannel’. Having decided to base round the hashtag #brumcc (a few test tweets fired off as people voted in the day), it all kicked off around 10.25 with a very geeky moan about the format for the streaming (Windows Movie Player) and the standard of the the sound (there was a problem with the gain on the wireless mic I think).
The actual conversation bounced between pub-style debate, willful surrealism, and the kind of listening and reacting to the actual words that microblogging really helps — collating the “did he really just say that?” factor between other viewers rather than waiting for the host to pick the politician up.
Four hours of it made us all flag, but it really was a worthwhile experience and in two years (when the local elections come around again) I really hope the council harness the conversation in some way too. It doesn’t have to be twitter (which, considering the UK local elections borked it, may not be around) but it was really powerful – and if publicised widely could be really useful.
Live microblogging a book
POSTED IN microblogging, twitter 4 April 2008
I did something quite strange and possibly annoying for anyone who follows me on twitter today. I tweeted a very-piecemeal book “review” of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. It wasn’t my idea – it was Paul Bradshaw‘s and I’d be surprised if he didn’t do a much better and more interesting job (I fact I know he did because I was following his tweets).
I did it mainly as an experiment, and also because from the bit I’d already read (and interviews with Clay) I knew that there were a lot of thoughts to share in there.
I learned, I think:
- That I can’t type consistently one-handed (put down the book when you’re trying to communicate, man).
- Communicating ideas as you have them not only forces you to to think concisely (as twitter’s 140 char limit does too), but helps separate points out.
- That I’m knackered, I’m not sure I’ll be doing it again – more from the force of thought than anything else (I could tweet something that long with less concepts and mental power need, but not a book like that again).
Sorry to anyone I annoyed, back to more normal tweet levels from now on.
I vow not to ‘crosspost’ with social media
POSTED IN blogging, good practice, microblogging, social media, twitter | TAGS : tumblr 10 March 2008
I will not use twitter, tumblr or my facebook news feed to announce a new blog post.
Who’s with me?
[EDIT] I also vow to keep twitter and Facebook statues separate. (Thanks Si, although that’s a harder one).
The reason is that I don’t want to contibute to the “background noise” I describe here.
mess of potage
POSTED IN microblogging, social media | TAGS : soup.io, tumblr 30 October 2007
bounder’s soup. Soup.io seems to be tumblr with more friend aggregation facilities. All well and good – the bonus feature for those of us that have very many blogs is that you can of course be logged into your tumblr account and your soup account at the same time – leaving two quick bookmark-based microblogging platforms available.
There have been a number of times since I started my tumblr account that I wanted another for a specific purpose, now if I can only remember what they were…
Sign up, but please don’t just use it to push your blog feed, flickr pics etc through automatically.
