Joining the social web

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 10:34pm

Last Thursday I went to the OSDClub meeting that was hosted by PHPMelb.

Up first was Alec on Twitter and the Social Web. Here he talked a bit about Twitter and Identi.ca, but mostly about other services that could integrate with it, and make it easier to use and also track other people on various services, such as FriendFeed.

This made me realise that I really should start tracking things on Twitter and/or Identi.ca because a lot of information is now being put through these services instead of on blogs or other services. But the signal to noise ratio still concerns me. I don’t think I could handle an unprocessed feed, even of just the people I want to follow.

I could also start posting myself, especially small ideas or updates that wouldn’t necessarily warrant a blog post. But I don’t want to dilute my blog. Thinking about it: I don’t want to dilute my online presence. One option for this is to use something like FriendFeed as my primary presence.

However, I would prefer to keep it all together (and more under my control) on popcorn.cx. Something like Lifestream for WordPress could be an option. Further investigation is required, but it looks like it would also give me an easy way to bring in updates I am already making to other sites such as Flickr and Delicous.

After Alec’s talk, Ben was supposed to talk about OpenID: What it Ain’t. Instead of this Ben talked about what he had been working on at work for the previous few days: bushfirehousing.org, a site to connect people offering temporary housing with people needing temporary housing. It was quite interesting hearing about what they had achieved in a couple of days, including the issues (mainly non-technical) they had encountered.

Tagged with: , ,

3 Responses to “Joining the social web”

  1. In identi.ca, you can join groups that discuss the topics in which you have specific interests. As well as subscribe to individuals.

    Stav - February 18th, 2009 at 7:59 am

  2. That’s good to know about identi.ca. However, I suspect that a keyword based search/filter would be more practical – especially for finding discussions that are not in a group.

    Stephen - February 18th, 2009 at 9:04 am

  3. You can also search for tags etc:

    http://identi.ca/tag/spectrial

    Velmont - February 18th, 2009 at 11:28 pm