Joining My Small Pieces of the Web

Ericka — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 01:50:36 +0000

I put different kinds of stuff on the web, this blog, del.icio.us, Flickr, facebook, recently twitter and occasionally youtube. I feel that I have two audiences “the public” which includes my future employers or review committees, past and future students, and anyone who looks me up. Then there are contacts and friends, i.e. people who might “friend” me. The place where I write for the public is this blog, which comes up first in search results for my name. That is not to say I don’t write for friends here, certainly they are the majority of my readers, but only a cursory glance at my blog stats shows that there is a wider audience. I suppose I’m trying to post things here that are not too formal and hopefully interesting, but still future tenure committee friendly.

When I post my “status” on twitter or facebook I think of it as more private than a blog post. Perhaps private isn’t the perfect word here, but fewer people can see my status updates since I have my privacy set such that we have to agree to be friends on twitter or facebook. Not that I’d write anything remotely scandalous nor do I consider it secure, just a nice way to keep up with friends and acquaintances in a more informal way.

When I post something on my blog I feel like there are a lot of facebook contacts that wouldn’t know about it, and when I post a picture on Flickr or a video to youtube nearly everyone is in the dark unless I announce it, which I generally don’t bother to do.

The new FriendFeed service is one way to solve this problem, but I’d rather link up my existing services than join another one, so here’s what I’ve done:

Status: Facebook / Twitter – My twitter status updates get pushed to facebook. This was a pretty crucial link since they ask for the same kind of status updates. I used the TwitterSync facebook app.

Blog Posts: Blog / Facebook / Twitter – My blog now sends a link to new posts over to twitter which sends it to facebook. I used the Twitter Tools wordpress plugin.

Bookmarks: del.icio.us / Blog / Facebook – Once a day if I’ve posted public links they will go from del.icio.us to my blog’s feed, and to facebook’s mini-feed. I use feedburner to add the bookmarks to my feed and del.icio.us’s facebook integration in del.icio.us settings. I haven’t found an app to add them to twitter.

Photos: Flickr / Twitter / Facebook / Blog – When I upload a new photo on Flickr with the twitter tag a link goes to my twitter / facebook status. That way if I want to upload a bunch of photos to flickr they don’t have to create 20 tweets, nice flexibility. I used FlickrToTwitter. I also have a flickr badge on my blog.

Videos: Youtube / ? – I rarely upload videos, but it would be nice if there were a tool out there that could update my status with a link when I did. I haven’t found an automated way to do this yet.

OK, so FriendFeed would have been a lot easier, but I didn’t have to ask anyone to join anything.

I’d be interested to hear how other people manage these kinds of audience issues. I’m actually presenting a paper about this sort of thing in October, but more on that later.

technology & the social » audience

Joining My Small Pieces of the Web