Me and Social Media
There are clearly people in the world who have figured out how
to follow large numbers of friends, acquaintances, businesses,
etc. on Facebook and Twitter.
I am not among them. I do check Google+ regularly and know
some nice people who occasionally post there, but if there were
more of them, I would probably stop reading regularly. I want my
news and email sorted nicely into categories, so that I can get
the stuff that I really want in 30 seconds, and look at the other
stuff when I have time for it.
To that end, I read my mail with GNUS, which splits it into as many
“groups” as I care to configure based on the mail headers. I also
follow a large number of blogs and other webpages with RSS
feeds via Gwene.org.
I don’t know why everybody doesn’t do it this way, but they
don’t. I’m always talking to someone who has unsubscribed to
something interesting but not critically so because it was cluttering up they (presumably one) mailbox.
I tell people I don’t do Facebook because I maintain two
websites and that’s enough to keep up-to-date. So I keep getting
annoyed at my closest friends because they aren’t interested
enough in what I write to bother to read my blog. But of course
it’s because their lives are so cluttered with Facebook that they
don’t have time to also follow blogs.
So I caved about Google+
There are actually things it’s easier to just post on Google+
than to put on my blog. WordPress is pretty clueless as far as
just posting a picture with a short caption, and Google+ is easier to use for a
one-link pointer. So some time ago, I put a widget in my blog’s
sidebar that had pointers to my last few Google+ posts.
Then last June, one of my Google+ friends said how much she
wished my blog posts on the Boston
Early Music Festival would show up on my Google+ feed. I
decided to experiment with this, and set up the Jetpack Publicize
feature to automatically post blog posts as Google+ posts.
Of course, this makes the blog sidebar pointers to Google+ less
useful, since often all or most of them are just pointers to the
last few blog entries. But it has led to more +1’s and even a few
comments on what I write, which the blog basically doesn’t
have.
So today, I caved about Facebook and Twitter, too
So I decided the people who are always claiming they would like
to follow me on Facebook but they don’t have time to read my blog
should have their chance. I have now configured my blog to
automatically post to my Facebook and Twitter pages.
I don’t know that I’m going to take up reading Facebook or
Twitter, but if you do, you now have a chance to read my blog if
you want to.
LayMusic.org 