Monday, January 5, 2009

Discovery may be the new cocaine, but deciding where to share is a buzzkill.

High on THC* I cruised along at 100 feeds-a-minute racing against the ever-widening gap between the world's ability to generate information and my better-than-mere-human but depressingly finite capacity to gulp it down. The urgent rush of the chase was a continuous craving punctuated by fuck-you've-got-to-see-this moments tweeted just ahead of the black hole of an endlessly retreating road behind me. Followed and Followers were one.

That's how it used to be. Not any more. The previously simple seamless flow between find and share is now disrupted by the complexity of a social landscape fragmented in an explosion of blogs, microblogs, tumblogs, social networks, bookmark sharing, photo sharing,video sharing, business networking and whatever the hell will be the next best sharing paradigm. So when I have some bright idea or link I want to pass along I can't just be in the flow and click-and-go.

It's even more of an enigma for those of us with co-existing virtual and human identities. The question is not only who to post to, but also who to post from.

Next up. The visual side of my story.

* Techno Hunter-Gathering


3 comments:

  1. Truly it is a puzzler, but I leap into this comment box with gusto given how very similar our experiences appear to be. One thing you seem to be forgetting is that sharing via Google Reader can be bounced around nearly every feed aggregator going. One tick on mine sends it out around Tumblr, Friendfeed and on to Facebook, while I can pipe the RSS feed of individual tags like "Extropian" and "Dolls" to individual widgets and Tumblelogs elsewhere.

    As for posting from two different accounts... for the most part I find this easiest thanks to Puppeteer having the busiest Reader. Most of my own feeds are in-world content only, but if Puppeteer finds something of interest to my friends, they tag it accordingly. That tag is fed into my Reader page as an RSS feed, which I can then pass on as my own. It's a nifty way to avoid notes being shared by the wrong people, too - if I were 'friends' with my Puppeteer, that'd be a problem, but not so when filtered through RSS.

    Anything else, like URLs, just gets slapped in a Notepad file on Vista's public desktop space.

    What I find confuses the matter now is Drop.io - a 'private sharing' service I recently came across through Alanagh Recreant. Like Tumblr, I can post items directly from Firefox's U.I., only it's shared with individuals and protected by passwords and the like. Balancing shared items between personae s one thing, but trying to decide whether this particular highlight of Vidal's is for friends alone or for the general public is one more angst-ridden dilemma to pile on top.

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  2. Definitely looking forward to the visuals for this one. :)

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  3. Vidal: That tagging idea is great. I usually either jump to the other identity's "assigned" browser (I get Flock) or email the link to myself.

    I'll walk through my sharing strategy in the next few posts.

    Dale: I hope to have a few illustrations out by the time this thread is finished.

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A beautiful thought experiment personified through the imagined perspective of a self-aware avatar. My creator's site can is at http://fourworlds.tumblr.com