Sunday, September 27, 2009

Consolidation

So, at present, I produce content in the following places:

  • On this here blog. I like it when people comment, but few of you do, probably because I post so seldom that anyone who isn't using Google Reader or another feed aggregator probably stopped checking long ago or stops by very occasionally.

  • My google reader shared items, which is probably my most prolific place at present. I do like the way the "Comment View" acts as a vibrant area for me and a few close friends to comment on what the others are posting, and since its where I do 95% of my internet reading, its a good place for me to be publishing. But those who don't use Google Reader are blind to this content. Although that's not really true - Facebook picks up the links themselves, but not whatever commentary I may have made on them. This is a very easy way for me to create content, using the 'Note in Reader' button, and it would be hard to give up that ease of sharing.

  • Facebook statuses, and, occasionally, notes. Facebook is extremely good at what it does, and therefore this is probably where my content has the largest audience of people whose opinions I might care about. Blog posts (like this one) get auto-reposted there as notes at present. As noted above, FB also picks up my GR shared items, but only forwards people to the content, not the commentary.

  • twitter. Most of my tweets are actually just repostings of my google shared items, blog posts, and last.fm listens channeled through bit.ly and twitterfeed. And sometimes I copy over a facebook status. Very little original content happens there, but it is one flawed version of an aggregation of these sources.


Which seems a bit much for someone who produces as little content as I do. Likewise, if I want to interact with friends and others, there are at least 4 places I have to go to read that content (not really; it all goes to Google Reader, but to respond I have to track conversations in multiple places). Google Wave may address some of this, but it seems like it'll benefit other Wave users exclusively.

Some of you will remember a time when this space was my only content publishing platform, and I actually devoted time to it. We had fun together on the Plane of Knowledge and I liked that it was a place where people I appreciate would gather and discuss things.

With that in mind, I think I'd like to try a little experiment. For a week, I'm going to try to create content (almost) exclusively on this blog. I'll still comment on others' shared items in Google reader, and will still post the occasional Facebook status, but I'm going to try to put items I normally would share in GR onto the blog instead, and my thoughts with them. Twitter and FB will still mirror/link to these posts, so I may not truly be consolidating the conversation. Anyway, its something I want to try. So watch this space.


PS: Happy birthday to me.

6 comments:

Lykaon said...

I've actually found myself pondering a similar quandary lately. As I have begun to use facebook status messages more and more, I realize that I get mostly the same fulfillment in a fraction of the time.

Instead of reviewing whole episodes of tv shows, I just facebook status my high-level impressions; that evolves into a conversation via facebook comments.

When I do such things on my blog, I get far less comments, and far less of an actual conversation about the content. I don't know if this because facebook is just easy to use, or if my blog is obtuse.

But one way or another, my blog feels like I'm talking *at* people and facebook feels like I'm talking *with* people. For this reason, I have not posted to my blog in some time and have not felt the urge to do so.

Part of why I like having a blog at all is the feedback I get from others about my thoughts. I get that with Facebook, it's more interactive, and I spend far less time devoted to posting.

Facebook is killing my blog!

Dave Y said...

Actually, as I noted to Josh over in his facebook comment, I prefer the way FB does commenting over the way it happens here. Is that something Google Wave will change?

Agree totally with what Lykaon is saying here about FB. If facebook had a means to copy in my google reader shares as 'links' and then put my pithy remarks in as a comment, it would pretty-well solve the whole dilemma. (not dilemna).

Dave Y said...

Also, though, FB is a 'stream' much more than the blog is. If I want to go back and review or export or otherwise deal with conversations that happen here, that's relatively easy. If I wanted to make a 'blog book', I can do that feasibly. At present, its much harder to pull things back out of facebook that aren't in the current temporal stream.

Maren said...

Wow- so much to catch up on. I like it.

Facebook is a like a mini-blog and I agree with all the advantages/disadvantages as stated. I like being able to go back and find items on a blog (not just my own); it's really quite handy. Blogs are just what they've always been: journals made public. FB is not much more than a public connecting hub to me. I mean, it's great to be able to find my 6th grade teacher if I want to, but there's a lot about my life she doesn't need to know.

Yes, it's inefficient to have both- and more- going on, but I use them for entirely different reasons. I post things on my blog that I don't necessarily want 249 of my "friends" reading in depth. It's not to the point that I need to make my blog "private", but I don't post its link on my FB info page that's for sure. And then we have the private family website, which overlaps FB and blogs to some degree, although I post things there I don't want on my public blog.

Jeff said...

So pleased you're doing this, Dave. I've been contemplating these very issues myself and am curious to find what you deduce from it all.

For my money, the 'blog is still the best format for the information I want to share, though Facebook is proving to be far-and-away the best syndication method for that.

Geary said...

OK, as a non-facebook user, I'm having some difficulty following this. I was also slow to appreciate blogs, however, so that shows where I am mentally. I love reading the blogs, though, but I only read those of people I know -- is this just my immaturity? Anyway, I have far less difficulty with multiple outlets than I do with just getting in the swing of them.