alex de carvalho

Blogging about not blogging …

So I haven’t blogged in a while … or rather I’ve been on Twitter alot.  As it turns out, to rephrase Hugh MacLeod, "Blogging Tweeting is a great way to make things happen indirectlydirectly."

David Berkowitz blogged how Twitter makes blogging better … and in one way worse:

"One prominent blogger, who I won’t call out here, includes a daily summary of his Twitter posts on his blog. Very few of those posts are worth syndicating. They only make sense if you follow him. I find myself reading his blog less now because of it."

I’m not the "prominent" blogger in question ;)  but as those of you reading the feed know, I’m equally guilty of reposting daily tweets here. The postings were archived and did not show up on the front page of this blog, but were regularly shipped out on the feed. This served a few purposes, including:

• Using the blog as a journaling and archiving system so that years from now I could look back and find what I was doing on any particular day, through the archived daily tweets here. Twitter has no archiving mechanism and it’s currently very difficult to find your tweets from any single day: you have to scroll back in your twitterstream to do so.
• Posting daily tweets to my blog helped keep this blog going at a time when I’ve been particularly busy and haven’t found the time to blog. The last three months have been very hectic, starting from before organizing  BarCampMiami, to leaving Scrapblog, to the various things I’m doing today and which I’ll describe in upcoming posts.
• In addition to keeping the blog alive with content, the daily postings kept Google’s spiders crawling and indexing this site for these past few months.

However, daily postings of tweets are difficult and/or boring to read and as David points out, they only make sense if you’re following them on Twitter as they occur, in which case it’s redundant to see them on Twitter, on the blog and aggregated with my other activity on socialthing! and FriendFeed.

I’ve been active elsewhere

Speaking of which, I’ve been active on many other services as well. I’ve added the social networks and sharing services I use most to my blog’s navigation and sidebar and have thus reclaimed my blog as a central identity hub from which to find me online. These services are listed under my picture on the sidebar, and are reposted below. If you’d like to connect on any of these services, please leave a brief comment describing how we know each other or why you’d like to be connected (see note below*):

Updates on Twitter
Facebook profile
Flickr photos
LinkedIn profile
del.icio.us links
Upcoming events
Tumblr lifestream
Trips on Dopplr
Dugg items
Shared on Google Reader
LastFM radio
Jaiku lifestream
Skitch screenshots
Presentations on Slideshare
MyBlogLog communities
Friendfeed lifestream
Technorati profile
ClaimID identity
Netvibes universe

*Note: I accept most friend requests, although I connect mostly with people I already know or have met on Facebook, Dopplr, Tumblr, Jaiku Google Reader, NetVibes, ClaimID, LastFM, SlideShare, del.icio.us and Upcoming. I’m more open with connections on Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed and Flickr, although I reserve the right to not connect for whatever reason - please don’t take it personally if I don’t reciprocate a connection request.

Having said all that …

… I’m blogging again