Twittering, plurking, digging through the universe

Tangled web

I know, I should be sleeping. But isn’t that always the best time to write?

I’m a relatively new and naive blogger, becoming rapidly overwhelmed by the diversity of services and platforms that are available to perform all manner of blogging and social networking tasks. I can remember, a year or so ago, lamenting the fact that there where so many services and websites that posted, bookmarked, favorited, dugg, ranked, commented, tagged, aggregated, distributed (all of these things and more) your data from your website or blog – to make your information more visible and reach more people.

You have barely worked out how to use and utilise one service, when another one appears that does a slightly different thing, a slightly different way. All of these services require that you sign up, have a user name and a password, and maintain a profile, and status updates; they have their own message, chat or email system; you can add friends, pals, subscribers, fans, crew, collaborators, customers, clients, pets – the works. Where will it all end? How can we keep track of everything? Do we need all or any of these services? What works and what doesn’t? How can we integrate all of these services together; so that we can make some sense out of them?

I’ve lost track of the number of places where I have developed a digital presence. As well as my own unique persona, I represent a number of musical groups that I am promoting, because I love their original, alternative creativity. In order to get them ‘on the net’ we maintain a lot of websites; social networking is a great way to spread our music and our video clips. We are not organised enough yet to actually sell anything; we are satisfied enough that people will listen and watch, become our friends, subscribe to some of our channels, give us encouraging comments – and share their own music with us. Slowy, we are reaching a global audience and building a global network.

The actual task of producing music and film clips is supposed to be our prime directive. Such creativity still goes on; but we have been sidetracked to some extent by the process of publishing, packaging and promoting our material. First we had to get our first web sites hosted and published, needing html and design skills, (not to mention myriads of programming languages and protocols). Then we needed to promote our simple little sites and make sure Google googled them and thousands of people would come and visit. Targetting audiences and markets for your site can become a full-time job, and has become an industry in itself.

As a musical commodity, it behoves us to have a presence on MySpace, where, indeed we have made a small toe-hold, as well as hosting our own web sites. We uploaded some videos to YouTube, but we did not experience many views; so we joined LiveVideowhere we established a small amount of traffic and friends. Later we signed up with TubeMogul, which distributes videos to a dozen video hosting sites.

From this point our traffic started to grow, and our dream of world domination began to take hold. We signed up for some more video channels, and some live channels and looked around for somewhere to spread our music. We signed up for more and more services. We started blogging about what we were doing, and what we wanted to do. We searched for sources of material to help us design, code, publish, promote, network and anything else that we couldn’t afford to neglect. We signed up for a new blog and stopped blogging at the other one. Then we signed up for another one; we tried to host our own blog, which we nearly did. In short, we struggled, blindly, alone; a gnat amongst the frenzy of furious fans and friends.

If signing with TubeMogul represented one breakthrough in our quest for traffic, the adaption of FaceBook and Twitter were also significant milestones in our propagation. I had resisted joining FaceBook for a long time – I didn’t think it would be useful and I surely didn’t need to sign up for something else and keep another profile and all that rigmarole. Did I? And Twitter? What a silly name. But then everything seems to have a silly name on the internet.

FaceBook is a very powerful social networking tool; I was really unaware of how pervasive it has become and how useful it really is. Twitter broadcasts short bursts of information from sources that you choose to listen to. These bursts of twittering might include chatty, domestic banter; or you can select breaking news, tech news, updates, gossip, informed commentary, uninformed commentary, Mars lander updates, hurricane and weather alerts, traffic reports, what music people are listening to, what videos and movies and tv shows . . . endless – but useful, up-to-date information, rich with links to more detail.

Twitter has spawned hundreds of sites, applications and services to enhance the publishing of 104-character messages. Blogging has deconstructed itself into micro-blogging; now we can microblog. I’m not sure if I ever intended to become a microblogger, or a blogger, or a web publisher – we just want to make music and dance. How can we make sense of all these websites and services with silly names that are now all part of our social network? How do we integrate all of these services together so that they work for us? How can we make sense out of all these silly names.

Google, (and all of the Google services: Adsense, gMail, Analytics, Reader, etc) Yahoo, GeoCities, MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, flickr, del.ioci.us, digg, furl, tubemogul, revver, metacafe, myspacetv, blip.tv, crackle, veoh, dailymotion, blinkx, uLinkx, mashable, beet.tv, mogulus, worldtv, livevideo, live.yahoo, magnify, videosearch, trueveo, ustream, qik, vodpod, bebo, oSkope, pixsy, mofuse, wordpress, drupal, blogger, bloglines, kickapps, tag.clipr, friendfeed, feedburner, RSS, twitter, plurk, thwirl, ping.fm, digsby, netvibes . . . and on and on and on – how do we see the big picture of all of this? How do we see how all of these pieces fit together? What can be discarded?

I know. I’ve raised more questions than I’ve answered. But I do have to think about getting some sleep, just at the moment. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow. I will pick up this theme of integration . . . in a day or two.

adios amigos
Chris Loft from the blogloft