Brainripples

I've been too busy to blog, but I've been keeping a list of things I wish I could be blogging about. So here's my meta-blog post:

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If you want to influence the order in which I write those, feel free to comment.

Today's Times has an article about people blogging less and Facebooking more. Certainly that's true looking at my own circle of friends and acquaintances. Partly it's because the value of a social network to a user is proportional to the square of the number of that user's 'friends'. (I have about 130 on LiveJournal and 443 on Facebook.)

But analyzing my own post patterns, there are three kinds of posts I used to make here on LiveJournal that now end up on Facebook. The quick "life updates" are better off there, but the little jokes (like the one I made yesterday about the Tweetie of Ghent) are not as well archived there (and I'll probably shift back to blogging them here where they can be found again later), and most tellingly when I encounter an interesting link (such as the one with which I led this post) I'm much more likely to post it on FB than on LJ. But again, if it's a link that I might want to stumble across again in a few years, I should blog it here and not (just) link to it there.

This relates to another article in today's Times, about the death of print leading to the death of reader-scribbled marginalia. But blogs like this one, in posts like this one, are the equivalent. A future researcher who wants to study readers' reactions to Dirk Johnson's article can not only read the comments posted directly on the Times's site, but can search for links back to it.

That only works, however, if our reactions are in a blog whose time horizon is longer than the day or two that Facebook "stories" and Twitter "tweets" remain above the horizon. I, for one, will try to keep this in mind in the future as I post links and my reactions to them. You'll find my thoughts here --- and pointers to them on Facebook.

I used to blog a lot more about my life; recently I've found that I (and many of my friends) have migrated more towards Facebook and Twitter for that. But I don't like Facebook; I use it because that's where more of my casual acquaintances are. I would rather take the time to write things up in a little more length and to have my "diary" be somewhat more permanent. Pepys didn't tweet and Kafka didn't use Facebook.

I'll still use FB for posting random links, and FB will continue to grab the RSS feed from here, so you don't have to switch to following me on LJ if you're an FB friend. (Unless you want access to my friends-locked LJ posts, where all the juicy stuff lives.)