Extrospection

Its an interesting few things that have all mixed together today.
Crossing several sets of ideas & some of my background reading has led me to some thoughts on the nature of my thoughts, online communication, online expression & writing and how it can be presented and delivered online.

I initially began with a small mountain of thought... I'm a prolific thinker, i can chew through several hundred blog posts a day, muse out a sizeable idea or two each day and somehow spend 8 hours at work complete with the normal wishes it was better, and gripes that i feel like sharing about my job. When I work through all of it & begin to tag & muse over it all. Theres a lot of stuff below the big idea layer. Most of it doesnt rate a full thought out blog post like this one. But its still worth sharing or commenting on.

So how can a blogger share all of this less structured information?

Micro-blogging, lifecasting, tweets, blips, bloops... seems like every time I look there is a new word for a new way to send something to either your friends or the world at large.

I used to ride the front of the wave, I was jumping on gtalk the day it came out, with no one else in my contact list using it for weeks. However i reached an overload point.
I became burdened with the task of avoiding unwanted communication, the signal to noise ratio of being a member of no less than 5 IM networks + several IRC channels became too much. If the signal i sought was random chatter i found it, but if i wanted to just have a quick technical chat to someone, it would be drowned out rather rapidly by people messaging me to say Hi or see how i was doing. I Pulled the plug on it all quite some time ago, & I'm now offline more than on (at least for IM).

But recently as I've begun to sink myself more into expressing myself through my various outlets, I've felt the urge to reconnect to the world, but i dont want to go back to the way it was, blocking & un blocking the chatty freinds that wont stop talking.
And so I wont. Ive been a fan of the microblogging idea for a while now, i used to do it years before it was popular infact. my first few weeks of blogging were filled with the 15 minute interval status updates, my mood, my work, my life etc.
And its come full circle again, Ive developed a plan for my content & how to manage it. Taking some inspiration from some of the very first examples of these kinds of message streams.

The idea of a stream of conciousness style of blog is not new, one of the first good examples is Anarchaia by christian neukirchen. He details the origins back in 2005

Inspired by the various examples ive perused, I've settled on a method of structuring my writings. Separating the content out into at least 3 distinct flows to avoid creating a blog that is unreadably frequent in its updates.
1: the 'Blog' type portion, containing extended works & original material from myself such as projects & code as well as posts like this one.
2: the 'note & tag' feed, where ill be posting shorter & more concise commentary on sites, other peoples blog & forum posts, videos, pictures, and all the other stuff that gets trawled as i go through my day.
3: the 'realtime' feed, this is where things get interesting, rather than going out and joining twitter or some other site (which i may do later & integrate back those updates into this feed, but for now its standalone) i will be posting the status changes, block schedule notices, random gripes & venting, and all the usual fodder for such short quick posts.

Its not 100% set in stone & obviously there's grey area between these 3 feeds, but thats the plan for now and ill be working on how to get it all rolling as i get the gears turning over the next few days.