My blogging tools: Twitter, Blogger, Vox, Flickr.
Thanks to The Day Job, I occasionally ask some odd questions of myself like "where's my identity being most self-shaped online?" though I probably express it as "shit, how many blogs do I have?"Lately, it seems I've been mostly communicating and constructing identity in the following four applications, listed here in terms of frequency of usage, Twitter, Blogger, Vox, and Flickr.
Twitter - blog by phone

I also like watching the social conventions being developed. Users can often see messages structured as something like "From Tyler: I'm punching David in the mouth." where Tyler is a person who's using David's phone because he left his at home. I wonder if that convention is developing in the same way in other similar services?
Here's a point that's fun for me to consider: I'm blogging with Twitter more than with any other service.
Blogger - easy, low-hassle blog

I'm still a legacy FTP user (meaning Blogger sends files to my web host) so I know that many of the Beta features aren't available to me. I'm especially interested in the flexibility of the new templating system and hacking on it mercilessly but, currently, this is only available for blogs on their dynamic publishing system. However, I'm at a ridiculously supreme advantage having been worked on large buckets of code for both Blogger and Reader so I might code something using the Reader API via a library I've created in PHP to update Massless with my regular Gmail login (a.k.a Google Account) so long as I can still easily manage comments and linkbacks. If that works (and after Google publishes the Reader API) I'll be happy to share as much of that as anyone would like.
Of course, by then Blogger might have other neat tricks rendering that solution moot.
Vox - blog for friends

Basically, I have a LiveJournal-like posting style environment now, which I love for all of the classic, oft-stated reasons: for its inspiring quick, transparent blogging which allows me to learn quite a bit more about people I know and like than I knew before.
Flickr - blog via photography

Summarizing...
In years past, I think I was more reluctant to use a wide variety of web apps regularly for identity updates because of having to remember different usernames and passwords. Especially when using different computers (work vs. home / laptop vs. desktop) but the Google Browser Sync extension has neatly solved this for me. Thanks to the efforts of a lot of software makers, I'm really very happy with this set of options and since change isn't, like, a core quality of the universe or anything, I'll never contemplate new tools again, right?Ok, after a moment's thought about it, I find I'm now curious if having an app (a listener?, a watcher?) or browser extension which stumbles with me from one online participatory context to the next and creates drafts of my activities (reading, writing, talking, watching, listening) as occurs and whose entries could be easily deleted or published at a moment's notice. Making that actually be uninvasive and comfortable would be an immense challenge.
I'm currently working on other things right now, though. Presumably, the Listener is a solved problem in a basement network somewhere, just awaiting some UI.
5 Comments:
At 10:12 AM,
Anne said…
I love Twitter from my 650, also. It's a nice way to keep up with friends, or keep up with myself, and yet another thing that keeps me glued to my Treo. If I need to take a minute to digest things that happen during the day, Twitter is the perfect place to announce simple nothings to no one in particular.
At 10:24 AM,
charles wetherell said…
Son, it is likely much too late to start correcting your mis-speaks, but to say you carry your 'Treo everywhere' is misnomer numero uno as from PDX to the Golden Gate you leave it in my van down by the river. I don't want to have to remind you again, but do want you to visit again in this milllennium. This mini 'walkabout' may help prepare you for the impending 13th year celebration 'into the valley of the shadow of silicon'. Being a pre boomer I still pay homage to the 'God of Day Job' so advise keeping it! As for Ev and Jason modeling aberrant job hopping, forgive them because they know only partially what they do and they are bank-rolled.
dad
At 10:17 AM,
magpie said…
i think that with such divergent ways for friends to represent themselves online, my preferred way to keep up with friends (both near and far) is flickr.
At 8:56 AM,
kev said…
I'm just glad you're blogging here more often!
At 12:52 AM,
Anonymous said…
Twitter is the tool I am looking forward to use.
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