A to do list...

• Finish tumblr theme
• Update and publish tumblr plugin
• Update and publish zenphoto plugin set
• Finish final project for university
• Write a paper on firefly and the themes contained within
• Write a paper discussing and criticizing the medias representation/construction of “international terrorism”
• Finally get round to finishing Doom III

Your Twitter is not your blog is not your Tumblr is not your FriendFeed

I tend to agree with the following: 

carpeaqua:

I love the fact that Web software has become more social. Being able to see what music my friends are listening to on Last.fm or what they’re up to on Twitter has enriched my life and helped me get to know my friends and colleagues in ways I may not have before.

With these new applications, however, comes disconnect. Our data is on dozens of sites and for some it may be hard to keep track of every little thing you do online.

THAT IS OK.

If I am subscribed to your Twitter feed and not to your blog, it probably means I think what you’re writing is shit and I don’t want to waste my time on it. I do, however, find your tweets to be interesting, so please keep on Twittering.

I think we are at a point where this stuff is still being worked out. In a way, it’s like when a new design style is introduced. How many sites are now using that awful Lightbox technique (even PocketTweets.com does)? We feel some sort of internal need to share every single bit of our lives through every avenue we are afforded to ensure that every single person we’re connected to sees what we do.

Rest assured. You are not that important.

There should be a set of best practices for social software usage. If it did exist, I’m sure it would go something like this.

1. Your Twitter friends do not care when you have a new blog post, update your Flickr or post a new link to del.icio.us.
2. If you do have a link that is relevant to a discussion that points to your blog, it’s OK to cross-post it. Stay on topic.
3. Your Tumblr subscribers do not want to be updated everytime you post a new tweet on Twitter.
4. Your friends will find you on the sites they are interested in joining. You don’t need to spam other sites with crossed data.
5. Embrace services like FriendFeed and SocialThing if you want to aggregate everything.
6. (Bonus) Sending over 200 messages on Twitter in a span of 3 hours is completely unacceptable and an abuse of your status.

It’s my hope that sites like SocialThing and FriendFeed eliminate the prevalence of this annoying habit of cross-polluting multiple sites with the same content. Until then, I’ll just keep hitting my unsubscribe button on the overzealous few.

The state of tumblr...

I am writing this as a follow up to a tumblr post I submitted a few weeks ago titles “Say No to long tumblr posts”, in hind sight it wasn’t the most appropriate title quite simply because that wasn’t the point I was attempting to put across and with the increasing number of comments related to it I feel it’s in my best interest if I explain myself.

So far as I understand it tumblr began as a micro-blogging platform growing up in the same pond as the likes of twitter. The one thing that makes tumblr stand out is that its posts are organized based upon type of content rather than arbitrary categories and/or tags. This appealed to me and upon signing up I began to figure out how to innovativly utilize this new online “tool”. I eventually decided upon using it as another distribution point for my blog as recently I had been posting just images or very short text only posts and didn’t want them clogging up or distracting from the interesting article posts so these short posts would go on tumblr and everything else would go on the blog. This works for me and as I just post image or text only tumblr posts I decided to have them primarily shown on my blog and syndicated on tumblr so I could continue my involvement with the community there, a result of that has been the development of a tumblr plugin for wordpress so no I don’t believe that tumblr should be restricted to any one single idea, it is just another medium, channel of distribution, tool or what ever you choose to label it and I have used it in my own unique way just like many others have.

With all that said, I would like to see a trunication of posts in the dashboard so it doesn’t get clogged up with huge tumblrs, showing the first 300 or so words from the post with the option to view more would be useful and that was my original point although looking back I can see I didn’t put it across very well, or at all by the looks of it…

I wonder...