Strange *affordance* issue with Google+: my blog doesn’t have circles and thus I don’t think too hard about the target audience. The G+ user interface strongly suggests I consider my target audience. Thus, I sometimes feel something is “inappriate” for G+ because I don’t have a circle it would work for. (I try to make my G+ posts *public* assuming anybody on G+ is at least somewhat interested.) this doesn’t happen on my blog.
Sometimes I put stuff on my blog not because it is for my unknown readers but because it is for my future self. Who cares about books read and music listened to and movies seen? Not I! Sometimes I read longer reviews. But mostly these posts help me answer questions such as what have you seen recently? What is your favorite 2010 movie? These low-level signals also serve as a kind of “I’m alive and well” message to remote friends and family. Maybe these days that’s what Facebook is for.
Anyway, all this got started by some vague philosophical thoughts regarding the meaning of life, growing older, the kinds of achievements we can reasonably expect of our selves—and I didn’t know where to post them. So I wrote this instead.
I used to do a lot of automated filtering and scoring in the old days with a newsreader written for nerds called Gnus. These days I don’t see how I could easily do automated input filtering. Skimming of headlines is all I can do. Perhaps you are right anyway, though. Everything I put on the blog and on Twitter is public. I might as well keep it public—or in my circles (thereby preventing my posts from ending up in public archives). I just feel ill at easy since everybody is claiming that privacy is so important, and how hard to use Facebook lists are, and how circles are a key feature of Google+. (I guess circles are still important to help categorizing the incoming stream.)
#Blogs #Google Plus #Social Media