Twitter versus Del.icio.us versus blog posts

I’m starting to think that my “here’s what I’ve found” items should move from Twitter to Del.icio.us or maybe even Tumblr [no account there yet, will explore soon] and just be summarised here daily. Then Twitter can be just the day-to-day status stuff — which needn’t be archived here at all, but maybe elsewhere.

Are you OK with that one, Mat F?

There seems to be a surge in “RSS aggregator” products like FriendFeed to create a unified “life stream”. But the more I think about it, the more I think “one stream that contains everything” is wrong. It might be fine for archiving — for your needs. But what about those following you? Dumping everything into a single sewer of undifferentiated crap seems to throw the burden of understanding you onto you audience. And all successful media creation is about what the audience wants — no matter what the scale.

It’s better, I think, to separate out the threads into different streams. People can subscribe to the combination they want. And they can choose to view them in the aggregator of their choice.

Business contacts get your business posts. Family and friends get the status reports about your lunch. A select few choose to view the reports of your illicit camel sex. where they want them, when they want them.

Well, that’s what I think today, anyway. What do you think?

Link digests: an experiment

As you can see, I’m running another experiment: recording the websites I find in del.icio.us and publishing a daily collection here. Just as with the daily Twitter updates, though, the list of random pieces changes the character of the site. And the experimental system provided by del.icio.us doesn’t let me format the posts — the most annoying aspects for me being the last of capital-L in the headline and not being able to format the entries. I may take up Brad Kellet‘s offer to use his script instead.

Even in defeat, he haunts us… via our folksonomies

I’ve been working on the tag cloud page, and one of my attempts to clarify things has revealed a disturbing fact.

Small screenshot of the Tags page taken today

I decided that the “category cloud” on the left-hand side of the website was already showing that the biggest categories were politics, the Internet, human nature, media and business. I didn’t want the tag cloud to repeat that information. So I decided to remove all the tags which were also the names of categories.

Boy, that certainly changed the emphasis!

Even in the reduced screenshot (right), one name dominates. Yes, out of 944 posts, counting this one, 91 are tagged “john howard”.

My own boyfriend comes in a poor second with just 42.

Is that right?

Continue reading “Even in defeat, he haunts us… via our folksonomies”

Fiddling with tags and such

I’m currently poking around with this website’s layout, especially with how tags work, while also getting the Skank Media website online. I’ve added a “related posts” feature, but tags may behave a bit weirdly while I’m fiddling.

“Recent comments” needs fixing

The volume of comments this week has meant the “Recent Comments” list at the bottom of each page changes far faster than most readers can track. I’ll see if I can fix that over the long weekend. Suggestions welcome.