No, sweet & silly Belle has nothing to do with the subject of this post -- except that I made that image for a Facebook friend, and haven't done Friday Cat Blogging here for ages.
Watermark used to be the center of my online life (which is much of my Real Life.) Now, there is Twitter and Facebook and Identi.ca. Also Friendfeed, which I have but rarely use. Also many others which I have but rarely use. Oh, and Open Salon, another neglected site.
Watermark posts show up in some of those places, and comments happen away from the original post. The conversation gets scattered and fractured. The center is spread thin. Too thin? Sometimes I think so.
But the spread also brings more people in. People who don't come here, notice a post on Facebook and respond there, and vice versa. More and more I use Watermark to post my poems, and other places to play and converse and post links. Lately my energy has allowed for one or two poems a week, a bit of play on Facebook, and that's about it.
I've been particularly frustrated about links that interest or amuse me. I've been posting them to Facebook, but not here, since I don't want to overwhelm Watermark readers with too-frequent or irrelevant posts. So -- I made a widget. It's there on the sidebar, for those who are interested, and those who aren't can ignore it.
I might even start throwing in some cat links there.
So one frustration is solved; I feel better about providing links to Watermark readers as well as Facebook friends. But I still don't have a center, one place where conversations are gathered together. Maybe this doesn't matter. Maybe it bothers only me?
How do you handle this? Is it a problem for you, or just how things work these days?
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I don't have a center in the sense of one lifestreaming spot, though there's a WordPress plugin I could use to have a lifestream page at Via Negativa if it bothered me. I've been keeping my Google profile up-to-date with as much personal information and as many links as I feel like sharing, though relying on Google for this makes me feel a little as if I've been assimilated by the Borg.
Posted by: Dave | 21 July 2009 at 01:49 PM
By the way, the Typepad account setup link here is totally borked.
Posted by: Dave | 21 July 2009 at 01:53 PM
Borked, how? I'll submit a ticket w/more detail.
Posted by: sbpoet | 21 July 2009 at 01:55 PM
Your Borg profile is one of the best I've seen -- it pushed me to update my own.
It's the conversation being all over the place that bugs me the most.
Posted by: sbpoet | 21 July 2009 at 01:56 PM
I love your Belle. (Did I ever tell you I had a beautiful gray/white cat w/ sea green eyes named Belle? She has been gone since 1995. Sigh. Her companion was gotten first, my soul-kitty boy DLH, a tabby named Beast because he never, ever learned to pull in his claws when he played with me.)
I have similar struggles, although your readership is much, much wider.
I have a Tumbler-account that my Identi.ca stuff goes to just because. And I save poem-like dent-snippets on a separate word document. Sometimes I regurgitate them on my blog, but mostly not.
(You forgot Momentile; although they are not words, they are communication.)
Posted by: deb | 21 July 2009 at 05:12 PM
Deb, my readership is not as wide as you think, I bet.
I did a Tumblog for my links, and made a widget from that -- yet another 'place' --
& I do like Momentile. You have a blog widget! How?
Posted by: sbpoet | 23 July 2009 at 11:31 AM