tumblelog

It all started with my orig­i­nal blog at Live­Jour­nal, which was to be the mis-adventures of a mid-40’s divorced woman. Since I met DH almost imme­di­ately, that went by the way­side, and the blog even­tu­ally moved here when I set up Art of the Fire­bird and became a general-purpose blog.

Then I dis­cov­ered Del.icio.us and Stum­ble­Upon as places to keep track of inter­est­ing web sites, and of course I was going to share what I found. Of course I had to claim my blog on Tech­no­rati, and then more and more inter­est­ing sites came along to check out. When I found about Tum­blr, I thought, “Per­fect! A place for all the lit­tle snip­pets and tid­bits I wanted to save and share.” So I set up not one, but two Tum­blr sites, one for per­sonal stuff and one for techie-related stuff.

I resisted Twit­ter and its imi­ta­tors for a very long time. But once I started see­ing more and more infor­ma­tion about claim­ing your “social iden­tity,” it was time to claim mine every­where it could be claimed. After all, I can’t let any­one else out there be known as “Art of the Fire­bird” if I’m going to use that as my artis­tic identity!

All that has cre­ated a mon­ster!? When I finally put together a lifestream aggre­ga­tor and put every site where I have an account (at least every one I could remem­ber) on there, it was, OMG, 42 dif­fer­ent places and count­ing!? Eeek!!!

So how the hell do I keep up with ALL of them?? I think I don’t. I use tools like Ping.FM (which is a god­send!) for the sta­tus updates; the lifestream aggre­ga­tors like Pro­fi­lac­tic and Friend­Feed and Lifestream.FM work pretty much on their own; some of them just barely exist and don’t get any atten­tion. The ones that do are the ones I really care about, or the ones that are may even­tu­ally be good for mar­ket­ing. I fig­ure as time goes on, I will keep try­ing things out and the ones that work for me will be ones that get some atten­tion; the ones that don’t work will at least not be claimable by some­one else using my identity.

Who would have thought five years ago that social media would be so, well, pervasive?