Social Media Research > Kudonomics

One cannot talk about social media whilst not actively participating in! I flirted with the whole tumbleblog concept where I would combine (mashup) sites such as Delicious, Digg, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook into a single blog/website. Doing so, I was hoping to create a platform where I would write and share my ideas, research and online activities. But, while in the process of building such a platform, the following questions came to mind:

1. Should I, from now, on only post on Delicious and not on Digg? Posting something solely on one, would render the other useless and I’m active on both.
2. What about the promising new services such as Twine? A perfect way of organizing, sharing and discovering information and, even if it still in beta, it looks promising.
3. Should I write my own code, using a library such as SimplePie? Combining the feeds of all my services making it look like blog posts to ’spice up’ the flow of content.
4. Or should I use Friendfeed to combine everything and import that feed into my tumbleblog? Saves me the hassle of combining!
5. How do I filter my content? Not every link I post on Delicious or Digg or message I Tweet would be useful for my ‘online presence’. What would happen if the world came to know that I love project runway?

When looking at my current online identities (1), it is hard commit to a single service. Even if I were to use Delicious extensively (discarding Digg), chances are that another, more useful, service would pop up (2), forcing me to switch to that one. Should I import everything from Delicious to Twine? Should I combine them? Migrating would seem bothersome at this point. One could imagine that switching once is not a big deal but if another, more useful service would present itself, the whole migration starts once again rendering me to be a digital nomad.

Migration and selecting a single service were not my biggest concerns in not wanting a tumbleblog. What if a service would cease to exist? More and more new services are being launched every day but, on the other hand, a lot of these services will cease to exist in the near future. What would happen if the service I use, for e.g. my research, would stop? I could lose everything. A possible solution would be to use the feeds to publish and store everything in a database (3). Doing so my ‘valuable’ data would be secure against bankrupting services. Plus it would protect me against those inconvenient moments where the service would be down for a small amount of time, like Twitter likes to from time to time. Before I started building a database I came across FriendFeed (4) which automatically does all this for me. But sadly enough it would not update on time. Another downside was when I would change something, lets say a Delicious link I posted last month, FriendFeed would not update properly.

Filtering my content (5) seemed also troublesome. Some of my students use Tweets on their blogs/portfolio sites (funny enough they are changing their blogs into tumbleblogs). I like to read them from time to time, and to my biggest surprise I read that one of them was recovering from a serious hangover. Something you particular don’t want to communicate to a possible new client.

I know I come across a bit like Andrew Keen, the Simon Cowell of the Web 2.0 era, and there are many positive points for combining different services. One of them is exposure on different platforms. But with the points discussed earlier it would be much easier to create a normal blog since in the meantime (a rough 300+ days) I did not write or share a single line or thought.

For that reason I started Kudonomics.com, a simple blog. I know … blogs are so 2003 it seemed like the best idea … for now.