Archive for July, 2011

So last week I became, temporarily, accidentally, a TV star.

The Investigative Discovery TV show "Wicked Attraction" did an episode called "57 Seconds" about a particularly sleazy Daytona Beach man who woke to find a man shooting his wife, whom he then gunned down. Didn't take police long to find this guy's mistress, his connection to the assassin, his criminal doings, his hidden stash of weapons, the video tape he made of himself telling his mistress to shoot another guy…  One of our editors at the Daytona Beach News-Journal, Kathy Kelly, was a crime reporter during the time of this remarkable bozo and was interviewed for the piece. Guess who was in the background, again and again?

Fortunately I'm a) blurry and b) hard at work the whole time. Employers tend to look askance at a worker displayed on national television while napping, juggling, practicing his puppetry, etc.

The show gets rerun occasionally if you've any mind to see it — although it doesn't do great things for your opinion of humanity, not even counting my presence — and will show up on iTunes eventually. God knows why. But I'm in it! Woo hoo, I guess.

So I've been in Google+ for a week. My life has not significantly changed.

I'm not going into the mechanics of the thing, there are far better places for that than here. Short version: It's Facebook without the games, apps, or privacy concerns.

It'll be good, I think, once more people are in there and the iOS app gets approved and they get a few bugs out. (The bugs that bugs me the most so far: if I share something with someone in a circle, that someone can choose to share it elsewhere [after a warning pops up]. I thought the point of circles was so you could disseminate things like drunken party photos without your boss seeing them? What good do circles do you if you send it to a coworker and that coworker broadcasts it? I think there needs to be a setting where if someone wants to share what you've posted, you can request that you be notified first so you can deny it. Just saying.)

But my main problem right now is, how do I integrate these things? I'm in Google+, I'm on Twitter, I'm in Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, DeviantArt. There are even old LiveJournal and Tumblr accounts of mine floating around somewhere, and my MySpace page is still there if anyone is still wandering those empty halls. And I really don't want to log into all of them to post stuff. So what goes where?

Right now my blog posts here are automatically posted to Twitter, and all tweets are then automatically posted to Facebook. Fairly often I'll post directly to Twitter if it's a twittery thought, and occasionally I'll post directly to Facebook, but Google+ won't crosspost to or accept posts from any of them. I can use Tweetdeck to post to multiple social network accounts but they haven't added Google+ yet (they have Google Buzz, but items posted to that don't show up in G+ that I've seen yet). I don't want to spend my day posting everywhere. Do I pick one or two and stick with them? Do I keep them all separate and use each one for different things? I'm pretty sure I don't have that much to say.

Is there a logical breakdown of what audience is where? Twitter tweets fit nicely in my Facebook status but not the other way around, and would make silly blog posts here, especially since posts made here get posted to Twitter. And where does Tumblr fit in? Should I move my Flickr and Facebook photos to Picasa before Google+ takes off? Or post casual pics to Facebook/Google+ and reserve Flickr for my good, portfolio-type shots? Gah!

At some point soon I think I'll be taking a look at all the places I have a presence (i.e. most of them) and start downsizing and consolidating where I can't connect 'em up. How do you guys handle your accounts?