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?

I’ve been trying to come up with a good way to save all the little snippets of stuff I find on the web — pictures, quotes, links to articles, and so on.  ReadItLater is a way to save links to web pages I don’t have time to read right now, but I don’t have it synchronized across my multiple computers.  Also, it only handles the links.  Google Notebook is another option I’m using but it’s better for more detailed stuff, or when I need to add comments to pages and such.

A blog would work as well, but I don’t want to clutter up Art of the Firebird with miscellaneous uncategorized stuff that probably is meaningful only to me. I could create a sidebar, but that still leaves me using the WordPress interface, which is overkill for this sort of thing.

What I need is an application that lets me create what Skellie calls a “swipe file,” accessible anywhere I have access to the web. So on her recommendation (and a few others) I decided to try Tumblr.  I can quickly store all my snippets there, feed a few into my sidebar here, and we’ll see how it works.  I’ll report once I’ve used it for a couple of weeks.

Check it out — Art of the Firebird’s Tumblelog.