Note: This was orginally posted in response to a class discussion about how/why use Web 2.0.
I confess, I Twitter, blog, read over 440 blogs a day, and I’m on Facebook and MySpace. Why? Um…I hang out with a young crowd? I’m not sure. Now, I don’t expect this to change any minds, but I thought I’d give a *bit* of insight into how I use this technology.
I started on Twitter a few months ago when a friend showed me the TweetDeck app. With TweetDeck, I can update and see updates on both my Facebook and Twitter, so I don’t have to go to Facebook to read my friends’ updates. I do have my Twitter settings on private so that I have to approve everyone who “follows” me. My followers on Twitter now are mostly my younger (early 20’s) and tech-savvy friends. At first, I thought Twitter was odd and useless. Now I use it as a cross between a mass-text message and as a way to share funny/interesting things that happen to me (i.e. seeing a guy wearing a scrunchie. I thought this was rather odd!).
I started my blog when I was moving from Seattle to Pittsburgh last year. At that point, I had friends in 5 countries and 15 States, so emailing them all what I was doing (or not doing) was becoming a pain. Who wants a mass email when you *know* it’s a mass email when it’s on a blog? To that end, my blog is now followed by readers in 7 countries and 30 States! Friends of friends started reading, I suppose. I write about my cats, my thoughts about librarianship, and my travels. I don’t write about my inner thoughts; that’s what a journal’s for.
Facebook and MySpace were no-brainers for me. I’ve lived overseas, and acquired a lot of folks I wanted to stay in contact with. MySpace was just taking off when I came back State-Side, so I joined. This was a great way for us to stay connected. Facebook was more popular among my law school friends, so I joined to stay in contact with them. Now, I rarely update on MySpace, but do update on Facebook at least once a week.
Now to reading 440+ blogs a day. I really couldn’t do that without an RSS reader (I use Google Reader). I read a wide variety of blogs organized into folders: Job postings, news (national and local), health information, housewife (recipes, money savers, cleaning tips), crafts (quilting, knitting, general crafts), Pittsburgh (my friend’s blogs and blogs about Pittsburgh), Interesting (videos, Mental Floss Blog, funny stuff, it’s a miscellaneous folder), Library (library blogs and news), Legal (legal blogs and news), Newsy (Consumerist, feminist blogs, semi-news type blogs), Music (blogs for the bands I like), Quotes and Grammar (Pictures, including Cake Wrecks, misused grammar and misspellings), Fuzzies (animal pictures and blogs), and Pix (picture blogs). My news feeds include the NY Times and Guardian UK, so this is the main way I get my news. I can get through my blog reading in less than 2 hours a day – about the amount of time I spent reading the newspaper before and now I get a wider variety of information.
