Most of us that have been using social media (and work with it) for some time, see ourselves in an interesting situation. Talking and doing. Perhaps less talking and more doing. After all, in the agency world, doing is what gets you paid. There is a part of Jake’s practice what you preach meme in there, as well is the life/work time balance we all struggle with. I call it the expansion and contraction theory.
We often get excited by a new tool (think shiny new object). We play, add friends, connect, tweak, etc. Pretty soon we’re at information overload again and either a) reduce our network or b) abandon the tool altogether.
Personally, I have significantly paired down the RSS feeds I follow and the updates I receive on Twitter. I follow what’s important to me and the clients I work with.
It’s part of an evolutionary process for tools. The things we can’t live without remain, the fun (time-wasting) activities soon fade away.
How about you? Have you experienced a similar expansion and contraction?
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I’ve experienced two things: 1- I need a better way to have a ‘personal portal page’ that will link to my online presence. Tumblr almost does it, but I’m looking for links. 2- slimming twitter makes sense, but I don’t have a problem with loads of RSS. Using gReader I set it to only show updated feeds. So having lots in there is no big deal to me. Tag’em and clear’em.
Posted on February 4th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Josh - Your theory makes sense. I’m perhaps too focused. My challenge is bringing in some feeds and content from other sources, switching it up now and again. The main lesson being, once you have your stream/feed/takeout order focused, don’t forget to keep “refocusing” it.
Posted on February 5th, 2008 at 7:25 am
I have had the same experience. But also, one of the highest compliments anyone can give me is “I was getting rid of a bunch of RSS feeds but I kept yours.” I always think twice before publishing because I want to make sure I have something of value to say, something original to post. I don;t want to add to the white noise of the mediasphere. Other bloggers such as Robert Scoble advocate a publish-all-time strategy, which seems to work for Robert. However, I know plenty of people that have cut off Robert’s feeds because of his volume. When I was with Robert at CES in Las Vegas, I joked I was going to launch “ScobleWatcher: All Scoble, All the Time, in less time. The 5 minutes of Scoble distilled from his daily mediastream torrent :-)
Posted on February 7th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Josh, I’ve had the same experience as you and the other commenters. The challenge is that eventually, almost every media source we consume goes stale and risks becoming abandoned. This creates a burdensome task of “media upkeep” for individuals, which leads to the expansion and contaction as you’ve written. I personally don’t see it this problem being likely to go away. There will always be new sources of great conversation and content, and we’ll constantly adjust our feeds to tap into those. The goal is to become as efficient as possible in this upkeep as to avoid significant media consumption overhead, no?
Posted on February 24th, 2008 at 3:52 am