What seemed like a good idea, turned out to not be so. Sure, archiving tweets in a personal place is a reasonably good idea. But mixing twitter-style communication with blog-style communication not so much.
Moreover: trying to comment and give extra context to weekly tweets as a way to produce blog-style content was a bad idea. I found myself without time to do it anyway, and the result was messy. I only realized the messy part when I approached my blog as a reader, by the way.
So, since the mixing was the bad idea but archiving tweets for future reference and better search engine indexing was not part of the bad idea, I came up with an easy fix: My tweets are now being archived on its own separate blog: for week in leo.tweets().
Finally, I've been recently more aware on the fact that on communication, the medium tends to be an important part of a message. This is an important barrier for efforts pursuing unified communications, which see the proliferation of mediums as a problem and aspire to deliver all kinds of messages through a single medium. From a purely abstract standpoint it kind of make sense, but I'm not sold yet that this is a completely good idea in practice. You know, you don't write documents, mails, blog posts, tweets and instant-messages in the same way. More importantly: you don't read them in the same way either.
Not to mention that filtering by medium is a useful search operation when looking for information (e.g.: "look for documents about database systems" or "look for blog posts and tweets regarding the quality of Ergohuman chairs").
I guess there is space for balanced solutions between the current state and the vision that the-medium-is-completely-abstracted-away. But I don't like to predict the future, and this post ends right here, without prophecies. Sorry for that.
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3 comments:
Very Nice post! ..
Some people, like Marshall McLuhan [1] say that the the message itself is the medium
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
I think this is how we should do it:
You just communicate and work on your piece of media. Could be text or video. At this point you just use the best tool for the job at hand. PUT it on the web. ( which may be automatic ).
On the consumer side, a user agent is able to asses the user's goals and might access your content if relevant.
So, what I am saying is basically. I think you're right in that we need some sort of "framework" or context. But that context will eventually be provided by an assistant for the consumer.
We need to review the model, so the producer produces and the consumer consumes. Producer should not be consumer aware, and viceversa.
An Goal oriented, socially aware experience generator could be used like follows:
I would like to be able to say:
"I want to learn general facts about Ants today"
"Yes, the biological entity Ant"
"Yes, take into account my social networks recommendation and allow interaction with my friends"
Go!
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