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.

I hadn’t really considered the economic angle of personal journal blogs because I’d failed to look at them from the perspective of the hosting companies. Looking back over my notes, someone at the Hyperlinked Society conference said that the lives of those who use such services are media products. This makes it more clear why Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace. Who would have though that commodifying diaries would be big business? Apparently it’s not terribly profitable at this point, but it’s an interesting perspective – quite different from that of the authors of these journals I’m sure.

One thing they all agreed about blog content was that the best blogs present a full personality with a diversity of interests. The reason for this was stated as that this promotes the serendipity of print that is often lacking online; that is, stumbling upon something you weren’t looking for, getting out of the wormhole.

I’d say that tags do this too. Just one example is that I used Flickr photographs in my class last semester as an outlining exercise. I gathered photos from different tags and one thing that was interesting was that the football tag was 1/2 pictures of what we call soccer. Just a little “oh yeah, not everyone calls it that” moment I think was a good thing.

I won’t be mixing posts about research findings with pictures of my cat, or at least, I plan to keep a professional focus to the blog. My professed topic – technology & the social – is wide enough for now.

It also shows you don’t often ‘get what you came for’ in research. My focus was on motivation – which was fine and tended to reinforce the conclusions of other qualitative studies, but the stuff on anonymity turned out to be a bit more novel and in some ways more interesting.

Annette Markham gave a good presentation about how, in research, ethics and method are one. Method is the context for ethics in research and ongoing reflexivity and a focus on “problem solving or world-fixing” is a way to get to a contextual & ethical project. (slides here, pdf).

Another interesting point was during a discussion of the technical limitations of data security and privacy (i.e. you have very little if any privacy online due to both technical limitations and under U.S. law) an issue came up from another researcher who is studying young bloggers. Many give out quite a bit of information about themselves, and the question was if this is due to ignorance about the nature of the medium or rather to the age and outlook of young people. So while it’s true that many don’t know about the finer points of textual analysis or even the facts about the internet archive, I think that most have the exact same perspective as many researchers which is that while it’s technically possible to get at this information I’m not narcissistic enough to think that anyone would actually bother to do it. The point of the presentation is that this is an erroneous assumption and these things happen much more often than we think, but I wouldn’t say that young bloggers who do disclose information that could harm them in the present (my route to school, my parent’s aren’t home this weekend, etc.) or information that is not intended for their parents or employer’s eyes are particularly ignorant, just particularly at risk.

The ranking of blogs is typically done through an algorithm. When a person or group does this it is called a blog itself. Many blogs via blogrolls or postings create their own rankings, and search (google or otherwise) is nearly ubiquitous. Add to that the growing prominence of tagging and persistent search and this makes the likelihood of any individual reader relying solely on a particular “top” list pretty small, although there is no data I am aware of on this subject.

It’s not surprising that there is no single way to determine ‘the best’ blogs, and any attempt to sort the mass of blogs will be threatened by SPAM and the preconceptions of the rank creators. Alternative metrics do need to be developed – the more the merrier, but what will be more informative is studying how real people find the blogs they read.

This post inspired by reading this post from Napsterization via this post from Many-to-Many.