Community Overload

August 17th, 2007

Blogging. Back in the early years it was fresh, cool, and exciting. Being able to tell your friends and family, even the world, what you were doing at a moments notice was great. I don’t know about you, but I feel as though blogging has lost it’s excitement, it’s luster to now other methods of real-time communication.

Twitter. Simple and fast. I love being able to post a quick message and have it show up in real-time as I’m doing something in real-time. I expect to leverage this quite a bit while we’re in Hawai’i. Twitter didn’t exist last time we were in the great island state. I made close to daily blog posts about each days events and activities. I uploaded pictures and videos. It was very time consuming to spend upwards of an hour a day blogging all this information. Twitter will allow me to send quick messages as we’re doing or moving to a new activity. In real-time I can say we’re on a boat, etc, etc. At the end of the day, I can upload quick videos or pictures minus the lengthy post.

Facebook. This one I haven’t quite got my head around yet. I joined today to see what all the hub bub is about. What exactly is Facebook? A blog? A twitterish real-time communication tool? A photo sharing site? A community? I believe it tries to be all of these things but I’m not quite sure yet when that’s helpful. This blog has all of those features plus I can add or integrate other ones easily. Facebook seemed very busy, lots of things to click and add text to. I’m not even quite sure yet how to post a simple message a la Twitter.

Flickr. I’ve been a big user of Flickr for quite sometime now. I use to use Gallery on my own server before I realized that I was mostly sharing my pictures with only a handful of people. With Flickr I can share my photos with a large community and then my family photos with just my family. The ability to post pictures while on the go is very important to me and Flickr provides a great interface for doing so. I’ve thought about moving back to Gallery several times but for daily photos and sharing Flickr is the way to go.

YouTube. I’m not a big YouTube user at all. I’ve posted two videos to YouTube and watched about 100 total videos in two years. I see it more as a community of people trying to out do each other than one that is about sharing experiences. I know there is a video blog community within YouTube and also quite a few FAQ type videos, which are what I’ve watched most. Overall though, I see a lot of competition towards users and posting the next “big thing” on YouTube. The thing is, I need a video sharing site. I’m becoming more and more interested in shooting short videos about my life and things I experience yet I don’t have a good place to publish them yet. I’ve been referred to PhanFare but I’m not sure I want to pay for a photo sharing site which does video since I’m an active member of Flickr.

Viddler. Learned about this site today in fact. After signing up it appears to have some promise. Not only can I post videos but it will link my Twitter and Flickr accounts on my profile page which is a nice integration touch. Another cool feature is it will post a tweet when I post a new video, just like Wordpress will post a new tweet when I post a blog entry. Viddler will also post a blog entry for me when I post a new video. These are the types of features I need. I don’t need to feel that joining an online community forces me into a cave. It’s needs to integrate with existing and upcoming tools.

Community Overload. I’ve discussed seven community based tools that I’m either actively involved with or thinking about using in the near future. This is completely ridiculous in my opinion. When blogging was at it’s peak, that was all you needed to stay connected. Nowadays blogging is third or fourth, perhaps even more reduced on the list of community based tools. So what is a fairly internet savvy guy suppose to do? I’m leaning towards continuing the path of blogging occasionally, twittering actively, and continuing to user Flickr for photo sharing. I really need a video solution though so I’m open to any suggestions (Although I think I may have found Viddler to be that solution).

Entry Filed under: blogging, technology