Blogosphere Tango
There seem to be more aggregating sites than social sites these days, LifeStream.fm, Tabber, FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, SocialThing… nice, aye? I have an account at every site I review on Sociosophy, and I can’t review something without at least giving it a whirl… hence all of these accounts on multiple sites that do pretty much the same thing.
I’ve found that I do prefer FriendFeed to track what I follow, and have been using AlertThingy for a few days to stay on top of stuff, and love it. But usage versus display? FriendFeed isn’t all that attractive look at, and though it promotes interaction via “Likes” and “Comments”, it’s not the source of the post, and to me… is a launching pad to get to the real data. I would much rather have comments/interaction to occur on the blogs and social sites that sourced the data, rather than in my aggregated stream.
Anyhow, I’m on Twitter, del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon, FriendFeed (aggregator), Jaiku (micro-blog aggregator), MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Pownce, Technorati, YouTube - which received my live stream from Qik… which notifies Pownce and Twitter that I’m streaming o_O, and Upcoming… oh and I have a Tumblog, which is fed into FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, and right up there in the upper right.
The funny thing about all this is - I only update my blogs (like this one) and Twitter directly from the site. Digg and del.icio.us are only interfaced from sites I go to. StumbleUpon and Tumblr are only interfaced with from the Firefox plug-ins I have for them, so input is pretty simple, and the output is available via a number of mediums, depending on reader preference - which is allowing to reach and interact with the reader-base without being annoying - I think.
Sometimes I venture to HelloTxt when I want to be “spammy” with something, but at the end of the day - … regardless of how many networks I’m a part of, unless you’re a part of those same networks and being a spam canon yourself, I’m not really spamming… I’m just having stuff show up where I’ve been… Strangely enough, thanks to Sociosophy, I’ve been to about 95 sites so far, and have accounts on all of them. (Google “nrek” you’ll see the ones I touch the most, I think). The trick is to not have the perpetual RSS updates encircle one another. This can be tricky, considering aggregate sites, and some social applications allow cross posting, which could easily be used to trigger triggers of triggers. If that’s the case, than you’re just being a noisy douche that will end up being silenced regardless.
Point being: Aggregating sites are handy for features like the two pages I’ve recently added/updated; and keep me paying attention to all the neat shit I love about the social arena. Some applications are handy for adding things to multiple places at once, but that’s only good if you’re not cross-referencing those feeds and you’re not doing it for EVERYTHING you post. Finally - actually paying attention to stuff you’re a part of is important! Unless you’re running a blog that signs up for everything you review… in which case, you’ll end up like me - everywhere, and actively ignoring sites.
Funny thing is - this post was actually started to mention - “Hey, I just updated blog with awesome! New Tumblr and LifeStream pages added for your pleasure”… then it turned into this. Whee!!!
*Image from: http://datamining.typepad.com/gallery/blog-map-gallery.html
