I’ve mentioned before that I’m lousy at blogging, not because I don’t like writing, but because I don’t do one-sided conversations very well. It takes a very strong thought for me to unhook and go into essay mode… and even then I’d rather corner someone and rant at them for a minute (or twelve) than just shoot my brainload out into the hinternets. I’ve even got difficulty with microblogs — if you glance at my twitterstream you’ll see I’m one of those chatty bitches that prefaces half (at least) her messages with @’s.
The internet (and since I work from home, I fair live here at least 10 hours a day) is my place for information and communication. It’s a big fucking library with a bank of comm units in the back. Only, I work here, see — instant message software doesn’t work for me, because I’d never get anything done. So I rely on asynchronous chat systems to keep in touch with friends, acquaintances, and strangers.
And where the tech doesn’t yet exist, I build my own. What-ever it takes to keep up with the whorls of vice, y’know?
So: Making my own signal networks.
Look to the right, and you’ll see the core of my network. Those are the folks I think of as my fellow satellites. We’re not all of us on the same orbit, but we cross paths often enough that they’re familiar and important to me. I track their circuits and smile when we do flybys. And I could drop their logs into a private reader and keep up just as nicely, but if you’ve come here because you’re curious about me, chances are you’ll find them interesting, too. And since I want to communicate with you, random readerperson, I want to communicate to you the people that influence my path with their gravity.
But I don’t really say a hell of a lot, here. I’ll get a wild hair every now and again and post something, but it’s mostly tumbleweed central up in here. I’m getting a little chattier as I get older, but content doesn’t happen overnight, y’know? If I’m talking online, it’s probably in the comments of a friend’s blogpost, in email… or over on Whitechapel. Only in the forum, I’m not just talking to myself (okay, sometimes I am, be fair, but) most of the time I’m in the middle of a conversation with a huge pool of clever and crazy interfolks. I mean, it’s a community, right? Granted, some of the zoo threads turn into no-fly zones fast, but there’s always a wide variety of interesting back-and-forth going on over there.
Which is where my newly mad idea of forum crossposting came into play. I was playing around with the RSS feed for the forum, fixing some validation issue or something, and I realized that just one side of a great conversation is interesting enough to make someone want to read the rest, sometimes. I mean, that’s what the blockquote tag comes down to most days, isn’t it? Or the @ on twitter? Or, hell, Overheard in [insert city here]?
Now, I don’t think the concept works all the time. Part of why I’m getting something like posts out of my RSS from Whitechapel is because I’m a wordy lady — I don’t stop with a one-liner if I can just keep talking, oh no. And I got into the habit years ago of quoting the person to whom I’m responding in my reply, so there’s some frame of reference for what the fuck I’m saying. And, again, it helps that I’m linking off a forum that’s full of actual conversation — a linkfest or imageroll thread would probably work in a tumblelog sort of way, but it wouldn’t necessarily lead back to the source.
But it works for me, for now. I get weird traffic, a lot of linkthroughs and little retention — mostly because this place is more-than-half sandbox for nutty projects and playing with designs — so I’m not terribly worried about running off my readers, y’know? And, in a week or a month I may get tired of seeing myself talk again and strip the functionality off again. But it’s an interesting game, in the meantime, isn’t it? Hearing me talk on the phone with little frame of reference unless you decide to pick up the line and read through the rest of the conversation? Maybe it stays. We’ll see.