Managing My Feeds

As I continue to think intentionally about my web presence, I have been considering the issue of what to publish where.  There are a number of issues that coalesce in this question: privacy, building community, over-exposure, fragmentation, etc.

Over the past month, I have developed a more variegated approach to my web presence.  In so doing, I have started relying more heavily on three posterous.com accounts: The Long View, which relates to my most public self, Associate Dean Long's Perspective, which relates to my daily activities as Associate Dean, and Life with Chloe and Hannah, which is a private, password protected space in which I have been chronicling daily activities with my daughters.

The Long View and Dean Long's Perspective both feed to my two twitter accounts, cplong and LAUSDeanLong, although there are ways to specify that a specific post on posterous goes only to one or the other of the twitter accounts.  As I think about controlling where my content is fed, I am increasingly aware of the power of social media and of the need to think strategically about what is published where.

I suppose this is really a question of audience and what to say to whom.  As I try to build a following around my work as Associate Dean, there will be things I want to say in that voice which are different from what I want to say in my voice as cplong, which I am increasingly thinking of as my most public voice - that is, the one with the broadest audience.

Here the question of Facebook becomes interesting.  I have been most intentional about my friends on Facebook.  For the most part, they are people from my personal life.  Now, however, my friends there are more complex, including not only personal friends from the past and present, but increasingly former students, professional colleagues and others who have come to know me exclusively through my digital presence. So, now with the ability to manage privacy more discriminately and with the increasing popularity of my Digital Dialogue, Ancient Philosophy Society and the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Studies pages, I am thinking about how and whether to expand the breadth of my Facebook friends.

Over the past year, I have thought of my Twitter account as the place with the broadest reach and most indiscriminate publicity - that is, I only block a follower if I think the account is advertising or spam; but I have not concerned myself with precisely who is following me.  On Facebook, however, I have always limited my exposure.  Now, however, with much of my more personal posts about my family being protected through one of my posterous accounts, I am increasingly thinking of my Facebook presence as more like my Twitter presence.  And yet, I think I might be alienating former friends by posting things there related to my academic and administrative work.

This leads me to wonder, again, about what to feed where...

Comments

[Cole Camplese]

I'm in the same place and as a matter of fact have really recently stopped publishing as much. I am really struggling with where to keep everything I have done the last several years (and I am thinking almost exclusively of my Learning and Innovation blog) and where to put new things. As you and I have discussed, I have felt utterly underwhelmed with my self hosted wordpress space -- and unfortunately it is where a majority of my readership looks for my content. I have a hard time jumping with both feet into the typepad world and I can't even allow myself to become too enamored with tumblr or posterous as a "real" place to manage my digital self.

I was planning over the Holidays to do some real thinking on it all and maybe even take down my L&I blog and remap the colecamplese.com domain to my typepad space, but have not done either. I need some time with some people to hash this out with and really try to examine what makes the most sense for me and the people I am trying to impact the most.

As to what to feed where, it looks to me like you are creating a difficult publishing eco-system for yourself. I'd grow tired of making all the decisions about where to store stuff -- and by that I mean that it sounds like the discovery networks are the same (twitter) albeit via different accounts. At the end of the day I'll need to follow you on Twitter, maybe three times, to get at all you are saying. Ditto for your RSS feeds -- I'll have to subscribe to several blogs. Here is my question -- do I write/say things online that I would need to have multiple places to *store* it in? If I am announcing everything via Twitter or FB, aren't I doing myself more harm (via the publishing decisions making process) by intentionally fracturing my online identity?

This may be a conversation best had face to face ... or maybe not. You pick the online environment or the coffee shop! Either way Happy New Year, Chris!

[Christopher P. Long]

Thanks, Cole, and Happy New Year. This will be an ongoing discussion as we encounter new technologies, so I appreciate your thoughts and judgment. Brad Koslek has helped by bringing the feeds from The Long Road, my Digital Vita and the Digital Dialogue blogs together into a single feed to the main Long Road page. The feed is this:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cpl2/blogs/TheLongRoad/index.xml

If people subscribe to that, they will get most of what I publish online. Brad is going to add the feed from the posts I make on the LAUS Dean's Office blog to that main feed, so that is still the place to get much of my stuff. That feed publishes to Twitter but not to Facebook.

Still, I am finding that the MT4 platform does not really offer the flexibility this TypePad blog gives me and I find myself wanting to publish here because of the social dimension of it. I hope the next iteration of MT incorporates some of the social elements found here.