I was listening to the most recent sweettt.com podcast. Matt and Luis were talking about how many different social networking tools people want or need. One was not enough, but many people get confused trying too many. They mentioned about 5 as a reasonable number. That just happens to be what I have settled on. See “My Persona” on the right. Besides my blog site, here’s how I see the five I have chosen in very simple terms:
Delicious – sharing/storing bookmarks and mining areas of interest
Facebook – social interaction
Flickr – photo sharing
LinkedIn – professional connections
Twitter – ad hoc connections – real time news and getting to know people better by hearing about their interests and how they spend their time
A blog can provide an in depth view about a person’s expertise, interests, sense of humor and lots more. I’m just dabbling for now, but over time will paint a more complete picture with my blog. I’ve chosen not to have a general “web site” for now, as the wordpress blog gives me everything I need.
One of the things I like about the blogosphere is the potential to create a massively asynchronous and distributed discussion. Here I am, nearly a month after this post, creating a reply.
I wonder about the in depth view of expertise. But it certainly is a view of something about the person.
The cool thing about WordPress is it’s ability to make a blog look like a website. One is a publishing pattern. The other is the technology to enable it. WordPress developers recognized that the tool needed to be used from more general CMS.
Also, listening to TWiT, I learned about http://squarespace.com much more expensive than my current web host service… and only supports one site / URL… but really really cool and simple for the end user.