About networking and community … and me
Posted on | September 17, 2009 | Comments Off
In the last few years there has been a lot of talking about Web 2.0 and on how Internet can be a tool for people to be better connected to each other; we got the RSS feeds to be able to aggregate news from various sites to a single interface, we have Facebook and MySpace to be connect with friends, Twitter to quickly broadcast short messages, and many more services.
Over the last few months I started to explore the various services to see if and how they are useful to broadcast whatever message I want to communicate.
The experiment of course started on my main blog, Silicon Gadget, with the RSS Feeds managed by Google FeedBurner, a service that allow to easily set up the RSS feeds stream on any major RSS reader. Than I opened a Twitter account so my readers that love to follow tweets can be informed from that platform when I publish a guide or a review on the blog. Of course Silicon Gadget has its own page also on Facebook, so people on that platform can receive the updates too. Finally I have activated Google Friend Connect, the bar on top of the site and the box on the right sidebar; this last service not only allow the readers to comment on the specific guides and reviews, but also on the whole blog in general and additionally they can see what other sites the other members like.
Of course such services are available for this personal blog too. I have the RSS Feeds, a Twitter account, a Facebook page and I am offering the social tools of Google Friend Connect (see the above bar and the box on the right); additionally I have a LinkedIN profile where I keep record of my resume.
Is it worth to be present on all this services? Since all the tracking services are opt-in anyway (so people have to decide to follow me on these platform and I can’t push them to) I think it is indeed useful to whom is interested to listen what I have to say; eventually the true question is if it is possible to keep all these fronts up-to-date to be indeed useful.
The RSS feeds were the easiest to keep updated since Wordpress, the platform I am using on both Silicon Gadget and here, automatically update its internal feeds and Google FeedBurner automatically pick them within minutes. For the Twitter accounts I had to install a plugin for Wordpress, Twitter Tools, so whenever I publish a post on any of the blogs a tweet will be automatically generated on the relative account. The Facebook’s pages are more particular: on my personal Facebook page I can automatically import a RSS Feed (for months it was the Silicon Gadget’s feed, but now I am automatically publishing the feed of this blog), but for the Silicon Gadget Facebook page I have yet to find a way to automatically import the feeds; actually in this last case is good that I have to update the page manually since I want to keep it clean and show only the guides and reviews that merit to be read (while on Silicon Gadget blog itself I may also publish some collateral post like the news about my updated PGP keys). Google Friend Connect is a case apart since it is you readers who have to interact with it.
So, is it all good? Well, it depends … on you. Do you find useful to be able track my posts from different platforms? Do you still prefer to pay a visit directly on my blogs? Is it there any other platform that you use and that you would like to find me there?
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