Ridiculous Thoughts

You read that right. One of my Twitter pals mentioned a new upstart called Plurk (I know, wtf?) that’s similar to Twitter. You get 140 characters, it’s sort of easier to follow convos etc. I joined (and if you want to check it out and sign up, just clicky, and you’ll automagically get me added to your friends list. Because I am that awesome.) and I’m still getting used to it. Not sure I like it as well as Twitter which I’ve come to adore when it works, but maybe once I get used to the weird timeline concept it will grow on me too.

Today seemed like I was inundated with social media tools and toys. It was almost overwhelming. Plurk, Friendfeed, widgets to display all this stuff… I love delving into social media because I think the more I learn about it, the better I’ll be able to help my newspaper, but there is so much out there. I think it’s possible to burn out on it. I mean, you need a MySpace, and Facebook, make sure you’re LinkedIn, if you’re in the media biz you need to join WiredJournalists, get Twittering (and now Plurk), use Friendfeed to let everyone know what you do online, learn how to make RSS work for you to manage the growing list of sites you visit, and don’t forget the old standbys like instant messaging, and for god’s sake would you blog already?

Ugh. It’s hard to stay on top of all that. I have a Myspace and Facebook, but I rarely use either because Facebook is annoying and I already have my own site/blog. Don’t really need the tools MySpace offers. I love Twitter – and I figured out why. On an old telnet chat I used to frequent, we’d pretty much keep the convo going by randomly blurting out what we were doing, from the mundane to the crazy. It was fun. Twitter is a perfect outlet for that sort of thing. Once you start following people you know, or would like to know (yes, Wil Wheaton tweets all the time and he’s just as funny there as he is on his blog) and you read what they’re doing throughout the day, it’s quite a valuable lesson in human dynamics (ooh! That sounded stuffy 🙂 ) sort of like sitting in a crowded area and people-watching. Only more intimate.

Anyway, so I tweet, and I’m checking out Plurk. And I’m employing lots of widgets on my various blogs. I would not be able to function without my RSS feedreader (at last count I had over 70 site feeds which means Before the Feedreader, I was manually clicking around 70 sites all the time watching for updates. Yikes! Now my feedreader does all the work, runs in the background, and notifies me when one or more of those sites has posted an update, then I can read them at my leisure. It’s teh awesome.)

And I’m on Yahoo and MSN messengers. I’m LinkedIn (and thank you Tonga for the wonderful recommendation). I’m on WiredJ. And I definitely blog 🙂 Also, I’m trying to make Friendfeed work on my blog (having css issues with it).

So I do my best to stay wired and up-to-date. But man, it’s a lot of work. Now I just need to find a way to motivate my newsroom as well as find ways to get some of this integrated into our site. It should be a blast.

Getting late. before I go though, I just want to throw out some good luck wishes to my sister. She’s written a script for a movie called, “Orientation” and Friday, at 2:30pm EST that script will be pitched to a couple of producers (one was a producer for “Michael Clayton” and the show “Rescue Me”.) She’s very excited and very nervous and has no expectations of ‘being discovered’ but she believes the feedback these guys can offer her will be extremely valuable.

Secretly, I hope she gets discovered 🙂 It’s an awesome script.