Matthew Lang

Jamie Tanna’s transcript of his talk on the IndieWeb movement is a wonderful read.

Instead of relying on another platform to host your thoughts, with their specific branding guidelines and restrictions, you should be the platform you want to be. By making the social network revolve around your site, you’re keeping it within your grasp and built for the things you want.

— The IndieWeb Movement: Owning Your Data and Being the Change You Want to See in the Web by Jamie Tanna

This week we almost missed another school notice about an “own clothes day” for Drew. The reason why? The notice was put on the school’s Facebook page and nowhere else.

The school does have their own website, Twitter account and even an app for your smartphone. They rarely update them all with the same information at the same time, but Facebook is the preferred outlet for the school to communicate with parents.

Schools aren’t alone in this.

Being involved in the junior section at our local golf club, I’m always looking for updates from other clubs for junior events that our junior section can play in. The problem is that clubs have websites, but rarely update their website and instead choose a preferred social media platform (most likely Facebook), and then just share it there.

Community organisations like schools frequently miss the point of having a website and how they should use social media to maximise reach to all parents.

Miraz Jordan sums it up nicely.

Make your website your home. Put all your information on your own website, first and foremost. Put notices on Facebook and include the address to find that information on your own website. Now people have a choice: if they enjoy using Facebook then they’ll see your post (probably / possibly) and can visit your website if they choose. Those who aren’t on Facebook can freely access the information from your website.

If you wish, use other services, such as Twitter, the same way.

— Why not move a community group’s website to FB?

I love this manifesto for blogging. Lots of good points to use. Also, why wasn’t I already subscribed to Hugh’s blog?

All content must be on your own platform. You must own your own domain, and it must have a monopoly on your best work. Other people’s platforms like Facebook or Twitter can only link to the content, they mustn’t duplicate it. In other words, if people want to hear from you, first they have to come to YOUR house.

— The Dogme 17 Manifesto: a guide to better blogging by Hugh McLeod

Last week I linked to Manton Reece’s dedication to staying the course for Micro.blog and the potential of blog-focused technologies when it comes to going up against the likes of Facebook.

There’s simply too many places to publish to these days and unless you have it automated or other people doing it for you (chance would be a fine thing), it can become overwhelming trying to post everywhere.

Here’s a few places where I don’t publish and why.

LinkedIn

I’ve have a chequered past with LinkedIn in much the same way as I have had with Twitter. It’s one of those things that is necessary to have but not always an enjoyable experience.

LinkedIn is a social network for the work-place but in truth it’s more akin to a hunting ground for recruitment agencies keen to place anyone they deem to be suitable for one of their roles. Okay, that might be slightly biased by my experience of LinkedIn but it’s the experience that I have had and I’m sure many others have to.

I’m sure it’s a great place for building your career’s network but I’ve yet to see the value in LinkedIn as instead of an introduction in person, through a phone call or even by email.

Anyway, the reason that I don’t post to LinkedIn or promote my content there is because I don’t have the time to read what other people are posting there. So if I don’t have the time to read what others are posting then why would others read what I am posting?

My usual routine with LinkedIn is that I log in, check my messages, check the notifications and then log back out again. I don’t read my timeline, look for others to connect with or anything else that LinkedIn has to offer.

It’s just not the place where I want to publish to. I could but I’m of the opinion that there’s many more people who use LinkedIn in the same way as I do and therefore it’s not the ideal place to share content.

Google+

This one’s easy. I don’t have a Google account.

There’s another reason though. I can’t remember the last time that I clicked a link that took me to a Google+ account or post. In fact I couldn’t even tell you what Google+ looks like as an interface. Is it even still a Google product?

When a social network like this doesn’t even trigger a visual representation of what it looks like then it’s clear that it’s no longer worth publishing to.

Facebook

Want to hear a secret?

I had a Facebook account for a few months there. Shocking I know. Mr “I don’t have a Facebook account” finally succumbed. Well, for a few months anyway.

I used it so that Ethan could get news and updates from his club’s junior section through their Facebook group. Now though my account has been de-activated and Ethan has his own account and manages this for himself while adhering to a few house rules on using Facebook.

The reason that I don’t share on Facebook is that I see Facebook as a time sink that I don’t want to cater to. Yes I’ve had an for few months but it came with a few restrictions. I didn’t hand over my phone number, I used a different email address for it and I didn’t install it on my phone, I put it on an iPad where it doesn’t ask for your phone number.

Once the usual email address and phone number goes in then the floodgates open. Notifications for friend suggestions, friend requests and who knows what else. I can do without that kind of hassle.

Medium

I’ve added Medium to the list of places that I don’t share content to as it has become something similar to Facebook. While Facebook is the place for sharing updates with family and friends, Medium has become the place to share your writing.

I’ve toyed with publishing content to Medium a few times, but while I have my own web site that I write for, I don’t see the point in having a separate channel on another network for something that I already do on my own.

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What it boils down to though for me is time and energy. Where can I share content without spending too much time and energy sharing that content?

I share my thoughts and other junk here on the blog because I can control it and I also own the domain.

It’s also easy to manage the performance of what I post. I use Gauges to track traffic to the blog and it gives two metrics that are all I need. Page views and visitors.

Micro.blog and Twitter are two other places where I like to share content as it’s easy to share the content to them and I can automate the posting between the two.

I’m still grappling with Micro.blog but what’s reassuring is Manton dedication to staying the course for the platform with an eye to the long term.

I plan to stay the course. I’m inspired by the work of the IndieWeb, which was founded 6 years ago and is still gaining momentum today. I hope that the solar eclipse photos posted to indie microblogs today will last through the next North American eclipse 7 years from now, and longer.

— Flip the Iceberg by Manton Reece

Manton also includes a link to an article on AltPlatform that suggests blog-focused platforms could eventually become bigger than any of the existing social networks.

Open source tools like WordPress, 1999.io and Mastodon.social are creating many small networks of publishers, and popular tools like Twitter and Micro.blog could peer with them. If all of the social networks outside of Facebook interoperated at some level, they might eventually “flip the iceberg” and become the dominant form of social networking.

— How Twitter, Micro.blog & Mastodon could team up to compete with Facebook by AltPlatform

With so many different outlets and tools out there it can become difficult to decide on where to focus your energy.

I’ll cover my reasons for not publishing on the different social networks later on in the week.

Rachel Kaser over at The Next Web certainly thinks so.

Like it or not, social media provides an easy-to-use template that lets anyone make their personal information available — and most of those sites are a hell of a lot easier to use than even the mildest website creation software.

— It’s time to kill the personal website by Rachel Kaser for The Next Web

I can certainly see Rachel’s point. With all the progress we’ve made on the web, the days of self-publishing means that you don’t need to be tied to a domain or a way of publishing your thoughts online. Social media and blogging platforms make publishing online easy.

Where I disagree though is that while these social media platforms are easy to use, they require an investment of effort in order to be effective. In order to stand out you need to be publishing consistently and that requires investing time and effort in that platform. I’m just not prepared to make that investment in order to build my name when I can use a personal website.

Having my own website means that I’m only investing in the content at my own website and then optionally using social media to get my content out further. I not only control the content but I also having a simpler delivery method for people. I have a place where people can follow me without the pressures of social media timelines. You can visit my website or subscribe to my RSS feed. It might be less convenient than following me on social media, but when you consider that you can read my website in a less crowded environment, away from the timeline, then I think having a personal website is essential if you want people to actually read what you’re publishing.

This week I finally got my invite to Micro.blog.

A few months ago Manton Reece wrote about a project he was working on to bring together micro-blogging using the format of RSS. He started a Kickstarter around it which went successfully. This week, I’m finally getting round to getting my account set up and following a few people.

The idea is simple. You can host your own micro-blog on Micro.blog or you can import an RSS feed from somewhere else so that it becomes your timeline. Rather than fencing people into the product, you can bring your own RSS feed and use that for your timeline. Neat idea.

First Impressions

At first the service looks pretty basic. Your own timeline is a simple list of recent posts from the people you are following. There’s options to reply, delete and favourite to posts on your timeline. So far so good.

While your timeline is a minimal affair in the styling department, your own feed can be tarted up with one of six designs that can pick from in your account preferences. There’s also the option to add some CSS styling of your own.

There’s also an app for the iPhone as well as the ability to post to it from the MarsEdit text editor should that be your preference.

Let’s not forget this is a bootstrapped product that began life on Kickstarter. I’m certainly not going to compare it in anyway to Twitter or Facebook, but compared the to launch of App.net it feels slower. It’s early days though and it’s live which more than can be said of what others have promised when it comes to challenging the establishment.

Using Micro.blog

I considered streaming a tagged feed from this blog as my main feed for Micro.blog but there were was one problem with this. The Ghost theme’s feed isn’t customisable, so there’s no way for me to omit these posts from my main feed. The reason I wanted to omit them is that I might be posting three or more times a day and I didn’t want to change the frequency of my blog’s posting for this.

So instead I think I might just post from the Micro.blog site and then map my timeline to a sub-domain of this site.

So where does that leave other social media outlets that I am a part of?

Well from here on in I’ll be largely using IFTTT to posting to Twitter. It will largely be an automated feed from my blog, my Micro.blog posts, Instagram and any other platforms that I use. Twitter has it’s uses and I’m not ready to bow out from it yet, but the for the foreseeable future it will be a “write only” environment for me.

After being burned by App.net, I’m aware that Micro.blog is still in the early days of its service life so I’m not going to invest too much time on it. A couple of posts a day should be sufficient.

I’m keen to see how this service grows over the next few months. I’m not expecting drastic changes overnight, but a gradual roll out of new features between now and the end of the year shouldn’t be out of the question.

You can find me on Micro.blog here.

Manton Reece is launching a new microblogging service and a book about independent microblogging.

I didn’t even need to think about backing this. I’ve been looking for an alternative to Twitter for sometime now. App.net has faded away and there’s nothing else out there that focuses on the open web in the way that Manton’s new service will.

Backed.

People often ask me what I’m doing now.

Each time I would type out a reply, describing where I’m at, what I’m focused on, and what I’m not.

So earlier this year I added a /now page to my site: sivers.org/now

A simple link. Easy to remember. Easy to type.

It’s a nice reminder for myself, when I’m feeling unfocused. A public declaration of priorities.

— The /now page movement by Derek Siver

Love this idea. A public declaration of your intentions and a bit of accountability too.

I couldn’t agree with Matthew on this topic more.

Having a personal website is something most people my age don’t do. However, most millennials have a web presence via social networks like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Having a web presence is very important, and is almost a requirement in this digital world. Using social media for your web presence works wonderfully, but you don’t own and control your content. At any time your social media account could be deleted, and then your long time web presence is gone.

— Everyone Needs a Personal Website by Matthew Dilulio

A very nice reminder of why I choose to host my own blog rather than opting for a service like Medium.