As I’ve just posted, I am now blogging for the Poetry Foundation; my first blog post, “San Francisco Poet Al Robles (1930-2009)” went up the other day. I am now officially posting on five blogs, though I am hardly active on the International Exchange for Poetic Invention blog, where I really can afford to be cross posting more between that and the PAWA blog. Speaking of the PAWA blog, poet Rachelle Cruz, host of The Blood-Jet Hour, will soon be posting the occasional review among other things.
I have also been posting to Twitter, which is sometimes helpful for directing traffic to my various blog posts, submissions calls, information about upcoming events. As many of you know, Twitter’s been acting a little strange lately, despite how many times I clean cookies and clear cache, so I haven’t been able to RT others’ tweets that I find interesting or useful. For example, Texas based poet Anise Onofre‘s been putting up some cool announcements about Gemini Ink and Aztlan Libre Press. Please check out both of these orgs. Tara Betts has been steadfastly promoting her forthcoming first book, Arc and Hue, which I hope you will also check out. No Tell Books has been promoting its titles as well as sharing news and information regarding the poetry industry.
Google Reader has recently added a feature in which you can send items in your RSS feed to Twitter. This feature automatically creates the short link, AKA the http://bit.ly. It’s easier and easier to share content. I think “relevant content,” “useful content” are better terms, but knowing what is relevant and useful entails knowing the communities in which you participate, and what is your function there.
That said, as Oscar and I have been discussing, Twitter is so much noise, and so little content. There is too much random crap to sift through. He points us to a recent article telling us that research has categorized roughly 40% of Twitter tweets as “pointless babble,” “I am eating a sandwich now” posts. Why do people think the rest of the world cares about their damn sandwich? I don’t care about your damn sandwich. What’s the point of clogging up these public e-spaces with banal bits of information? “At least make the sammich interesting,” Oscar says. Indeed, I see poets and writers tweeting interesting meals, creating lovely visuals in such small spaces. Karen An-hwei Lee does this kind of sampling and remixing from various stimuli, and I think this is an extension of her Ardor poetics; I look forward to her daily finds, orchids or aloe vera plants at a local nursery, as well as excerpts from poetry she’s reading.
I think I need to use Tweetdeck to help me sort through all of these bits of noise in order to find the actual useful stuff. That, or I unfollow more people. Isn’t it funny though, needing new applications to help us navigate through existing applications, because the existing applications aren’t as helpful as they’re alleged to be.
I think I’d like to hear more from folks regarding your on-line presences. Why are you plugged in? What do you hope to accomplish or gain being plugged in?
I suspect I joined Twitter (what, three years ago?) for the opposite reasons you did: not as a social networking *tool*, but precisely to read about the random crap that my friends are up to. =) (Up till a year ago, just before Twitter really blew up, almost all of the people I followed were actual friends.)
It’s related to how I use Facebook — I upload photos and post links onto Facebook regularly, but in the end it’s still mostly the Facebook statuses that I read. Yes, a lot of the tweets / statuses are of the “eating a sandwich” variety, but I honestly don’t mind — after a while, something interesting happens in the slow accretion of daily detail… a digital veneer of intimacy or knowledge or something that smells similar. None of it is genuine, obviously, but I find it all weirdly compelling nonetheless.
Seeing what friends are listening to / reading / watching is slightly more interesting to me. Of course, I’d prefer reading something more substantial (like why friends actually *like* something), but hey, not everyone blogs. =)
I don’t know over two-thirds of my followers (after removing all the sp*mmers, anyhow). Some of them are clearly marketing something after finding a keyword in my tweets. But some are real people who ostensibly do read my drivel, leading me to wonder if they’re there because they found me on my websites.
I’ve considered opening a separate filmeyeballsbrain twitter account, which will essentially duplicate my RSS feed — and that way folks who only really want to read about blog updates don’t have to deal with my meal tweets again — but that seems unnecessarily complicated.
( http.likeawhisper.wordpress.com)
I blog and I tweet.
Like you, I find twitter untenable often. I have over 200 people whose feeds I follow, but I lose most of the people I really want to hear from daily in a cacophony of insular conversations between some of the more prolific people I follow. Recently I discovered that meant I was actually losing tweets directed specifically to me and that ones more than 10 days old were gone forever. People who I had spoken with and enjoyed bouncing ideas off of in real time were lost to the endless back and forth noise about television appearances or bad behavior/storylines of pundits and actors. It’s like an endless waterfall of blah in which occasionally a sweet song can be heard in the distance.
My rule: I unsubscribe anyone who tweets amount to sandwich talk, as you put it, for more than 1 day. AND I run a search on the names of people I am following whose tweets I have not seen for more than 1 day in my regular feed.
Since so many ppl have moved their important content onto twitter, it seems like this is one of the only ways I know of to keep track of info and not be overloaded.
As for group blogging: there are trade offs to doing multiple blogs. When I first started I was invited to participate on several group blogs and do radio show interviews on key political issues like prop 8. I said no to both b/c I had imagined my blog as a space where me and the .5 people interested in my random musings could talk amongst ourselves in the corner. Clearly my imagination was to blame on that one and yet, I enjoy getting up in the morning and knowing the only writing I have to do is for me and if I don’t get it done no one is going to be put out.
As blogging mainstreams, credibility seems to be tied not only to your traffic but also to the number of places you have a voice. That has radically shifted what it means to be an engaged blogger and how many ppl feel invested in talking back when you write. In the 3.5 years I’ve blogged, I’ve seen ppl who had amazing content be abandoned for ppl who have hit or miss material but it is everywhere. So the only thing I would caution a creative writer or intellectual about in this medium is make sure your content matters. If you do multiple blogs and/or interviews make them count don’t just phone it in. I’ve seen ppl tweet about how they did an interview drunk & still drinking or how they have nothing to say in their next interview and can someone please give them a topic or help generate ideas. As long as you are writing something that adds value to all the information out there, having a wider audience and collaborating makes sense, but otherwise it is kind of like a longer version of look @ my sandwich.
I’m enjoying twitter a lot. The rubbish is easy to edit out, just unfollow. I also immediately unfollow anything that sounds even remotely like criticism. As a consequence my twitter is like a paradise, a lot of encouragement, thinking, contributing and very very little self-promotion.
Hey folks, thanks for your responses. I’ve taken your advice and unfollowed a bunch of people. Twitter’s a lot quieter now.
Many good things said here, and I will definitely continue posting on e-life. Thanks again.
I plugged in to meet other writers; 1} because I was a stay-at-home mom for two years and wanted/needed the intellectual stimulation and community vibe 2} It motivates me to follow the writing life of others, 3} and currently, to put word out about work that is close to me, like what you mentioned above (thank you). But it is ironic that I spend a good amount of time reading online instead of using that time for writing, as you mentioned in a previous post.