{Cheese and Beans}

I’ve been using posterous to throw thoughts into this blog for a while now. It’s a clever system that lets you publish to multiple places off the back of one email. I played with it some months ago, and walked away – then in a fit of laziness started using it again late last year. It seemed almost magical that I could send one email, and have my content automagically appear on Wordpress, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Facebook, Blogger, Flickr, Delicious, and any number of other sites.

There are a few reasons I’m packing it in – most of them technical – but some of them practical too. Quite apart from it generating horrible markup from Google Mail, throwing the content I generate out across multiple platforms is diluting my readership. I realised while reading one of Guy Kawasaki’s “Holy Kaw” posts yesterday how annoying it is that he forces readers through several portal pages before you reach content. I didn’t like it at all, and then realised that it’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

If you had happened upon one of my blog posts on Facebook, the link would have taken you to posterous, not Wordpress. That was pretty stupid of me. I’m not trying to track readers, but I would like to think people can find their way back to me if they liked something I wrote – if my writing is appearing all over the place, then it’s difficult for them to do that.

I seem to have created accounts everywhere, and now I’m not sure what I might do with them. I’ll probably kill off posterous entirely. I’ll keep Tumblr because the community is fantastic, and I’ll keep LiveJournal for the same reason.

I’m good at causing chaos, aren’t I…

I have been playing with Tumblr again (my page lives at jonbeckett.tumblr.com). I know I shouldn’t but I can’t leave it alone. It’s addictive. Imagine Twitter with images, videos, sound, quotes, and full blog posts. Imagine Facebook without family, and no walls – no borders.

Tumblr seems to be filled with creative people – photographers, artists, writers, readers… and supports those who appreciate great content too; allowing the sharing of anything as a central feature.

Rather than comment, you are encouraged to show content on your own page, with your own comment as an additional part of the content – a good analogy might be buying a print of a painting from a gallery to show in your own house.

Tumblr has lots of toys too – an opt-in directory of members, global search, all manner of apps (including a wonderful iPhone app), and integrations with numerous blogging platforms.

The lack of comments is liberating. While we like to encourage others to comment on blog posts, what purpose do they actually serve? How many of the A-List bloggers allow comments any more? There’s something uncomfortably self-absorbed about encouraging comment on the content we produce as bloggers.

Above all, Tumblr wins because everything is open. By default all of your content is available to everybody – member or not. This brings responsibility, but there is no requirement to provide a real identity within the site either.

Oh – one last thing – Tumblr has no censorship. You own your content. Remember what I was saying about responsibility?

I gained access to the Google Wave beta earlier today, and logged in with quite some excitement. If you’ve not heard about Google Wave yet, you have either been living under a stone, or you have a life – you know, a real life, like normal people. I burst through the doors, and while not expecting anything in particular, I didn’t quite expect what I saw.

Tumbleweed blew by. I’m not joking.

Google Wave is designed to aid collaboration – and my admittedly (purposely) minimal past experience of “collaborating” had a key feature – other people. I felt like the kid who was told to check out the swimming pool on the roof, and was then shut on the fire escape.

Perhaps I’m a victim of my own enthusiasm for the proliferation of social tools sweeping the internet at the moment. Those of us with a curious bent will no doubt have explored Tumblr, Friendfeed, Identica, and Twitter. The rest of the connected world is only just getting it’s head around Facebook.

Facebook has a bell shaped experience curve. In the first few days of membership, people request the world and it’s dog as friends. They then discover the “applications” and waste 23 hours of each day completing movie quizes, throwing cakes at each other, or attempting to talk like a pirate. Their social graph eventually drops off when they discover Farmville, and their own family don’t see them again.

I sometimes wonder what the current “new generation” on the internet would have made of IRC and Usenet. IRC, or “Internet Relay Chat” still exists of course – providing a wonderful back channel to the advertising laden idiocracy that pervades the world wide web.

There seems to be a danger inherent in all forms of “social media” – that you may end up spending so much time cultivating, feeding and managing the various relationships you build that your time in the virtual world eventually exceeds the time you spend in the “real world”.

A news report on the television caught my attention while making dinner last night – asking if people could survive without their mobile phones. They were met with horror struck gasps and laughter at the clearly preposterous idea. I noticed they only asked women.

Is it so preposterous though?

Has social media improved or damaged our lives?

When you’re busy fiddling with something interesting, it’s easy to become so engrossed in “the next thing” that you forget all about the trail of things you have been fiddling with previously – that invariably stretch out like a trail of destruction behind you.

We witness it all the time with our children; they are completely oblivious to the scene of devastation surrounding their latest flight of fantasy involving Bratz dolls, stickers, colouring pencils, playing cards, board games, and anything else they happened to pass by on their adventure. Quite why it all needs to be out, strewn across the floor, and jammed down the back of the sofa is a really good question.

I can’t judge the children though, because I exhibit the same failing. Over the last several months I have frequented Facebook, LiveJournal, Posterous, Wordpress, Tumblr, Twitter, Friendfeed and any number of other social networking or blogging destinations on the internet. All the while I have had a sadly neglected “home” – a personal blog – a place to call my own.

Through the various toys available within the sites mentioned above, they can be plumbed into each other – spectacularly so with Posterous. Perhaps an analogy might better describe the situation? Imagine you could turn the television on in your house by running the cold tap on the kitchen sink… and that the sink filling could turn the cooker on, unlock the back door, and feed the cat. That’s effectively what I have done. I’ve woven a tapestry of such complexity that I have no idea how to untangle it short of walking away from the whole damn thing.

I am a victim of myself. I have nobody else to blame. I am officially stupid. If there was a pack of trumps for stupid people, I would be quite the valuable card.

I may not know many things, or be able to work them out judging from the story I just related, but I do know that this blog – Cheese and Beans – is a good thing. I get to share my most mundane, idiotic or pointless thoughts with an audience who arrived here quite by chance, and may never pass again. Sometimes a fellow crazy person happens upon this place though, and we make friends in the same manner as small children meeting in a playground.

Livejournal? Tumblr? Wordpress? Facebook? MySpace? Twitter?

Which one should I use? All of them? None of them?

I don’t know anything any more. It’s all too much.

End of rant.

I thought it might be interesting to share the results of my week long assault on Tumblr, and it’s ranking system – “Tumblarity”…

After a week of posting, sharing, following, liking, and re-blogging, I have vaulted myself from a nobody to the top 150 users of Tumblr in the UK. I did this on the back of about half an hour each evening.

Perhaps the most interesting outcome of the experiment has been the realisation that I like Tumblr more than traditional blogging. It seems much closer to scrap-booking than writing – and there’s something refreshing about that. As I have built a list of people to follow (through the excellent directory and search facilities), my “dashboard” page has become a favoured destination to spend a few minutes.

At the moment I have the Disqus commenting system installed because Tumblr has nothing of it’s own – but am rapidly coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t need it. Tumblr is more about sharing, and re-sharing than passing judgement. If you like something you mark it as liked. If you want to share something with others, you re-blog it… end of story. Like I said – it’s refreshing. A different take.

There are some nice gadgets included too – the ability to suck in a few of your other feeds is invaluable – you’ll most likely integrate it with Twitter, Flickr, and perhaps your wordpress blog – meaning that any posts to those services appear in your Tumblog too.

If you’re interested in taking a look, head on over to the Tumblr home page at www.tumblr.com. Then head over to my Tumblog – jonbeckett.tumblr.com and follow me :)

I think I’m finally beginning to get my head around Tumblr. Where Wordpress is designed for wordsmiths – people with a story to tell – Tumblr is designed for people (like me) who find lots of interesting stuff, and wish they had an easy way of storing and sharing it.

I think perhaps the secret behind Tumblr is it’s simplicity. Take the “dashboard” for example;

Notice you are not just writing “a post” in your Tumblr scrapbook – you are throwing a conversation, a link, a photo, a video, or whatever – and it will be represented appropriately. To make life even easier, there are Javascript bookmarklets for your browser, and an iPhone application.

The iPhone application suddenly makes the idea of “Life Blogging” far more realistic for the rest of us – being able to note photos, observations, and thoughts while on the move.

If you join Tumblr, feel free to start “following” me – jonbeckett.tumblr.com.

You read the title correctly. Given the ever increasing demands on my time over the last month or so, the frequency and quality of my blog posts has hit an all time low. Coinciding with all of this, one of my greatest friends on the internet has switched to Tumblr, and most of my friends and colleagues are finally using Twitter.

A couple of years ago I looked at Tumblr, and liked what I saw. The only thing that stopped me from using it was the dearth of friends using it. There is also a certain level of circumspection based on the fact that any hosted service could have it’s plug pulled at any point – taking your words with it.

My tumblr account is here…

http://jonbeckett.tumblr.com

It’s difficult. Do we hold on to the words we write – the thoughts we share – or do we cast them out into the world, and let them go? Will we put less effort in as a result ?

I’ve spent the last hour looking at Tumblr after a far flung friend (laurenmalone.tumblr.com) voiced her admiration of it. I was surprised – she has been hosting her blog on Squarespace for the last couple of years – Squarespace is widely regarded as perhaps the best blogging platform in existence. As an aside, how Lauren isn’t an A-List blogger up with the Dooce’s of this world is anybody’s guess – go read her blog for yourself – you’ll ask yourself the same question.

I digress.

I spent an hour messing around with Tumblr – figuring out what was new since I last looked at it (I had a Tumblr account for a long time). If you have the same kind of enquiring mind that I do, “just taking a look” is never “just taking a look”. Within minutes I had recreated my Tumblog – jonbeckett.tumblr.com – and was sucking in my Twitter, Flickr and blog feeds.

I am my own worst enemy – it didn’t stop there. Over the next hour I played with 12seconds.tv again, and then headed over to Vimeo.

Before I knew it, Saturday afternoon had vanished. If there was a medal for throwing time away on fruitless pursuits, I could be a multiple olympic champion.

How have you wasted your saturday?