Sometimes when I blog about politics, I’ll get a comment like this:
As far as I’m concerned, posting about topics such as politics or religions on a blog that’s supposedly about technology is just looking for trouble.
As I’ve pointed out before, DevHawk is not “a blog that’s supposedly about technology”. It’s a personal blog – my very tiny corner of the web, if you will – so I feel totally justified writing about technology, politics, hockey and whatever else I want to. I figure that if you don’t like it, you’re free to unsubscribe and neither of either of us will lose any sleep over it.
The flip side is that DevHawk has traditionally been the only place where I exercise such lack-of-restraint. When my blog was featured on MSDN Architecture Center, I cross-posted relevant content to a separate blog so as to create an topic-focused and safe-for-work subset of my “real” blog. It was always a hassle – especially tracking comments to the same post in two places – and I quit doing it shortly after leaving the Architecture Strategy Team.
However, now that I’m using Twitter, it doesn’t feel like DevHawk is “my only place” anymore. My blog == my writing, my del.icio.us == links I find interesting and my Twitter == real time updates. I use FeedBurner to include my del.icio.us links in my blog feed and twitterfeed to include the blog feed in my twitter feed. Therefore, Twitter is the only place to get an feed of all three. Obviously, Twitter’s feed isn’t full content, but in an always connected world, clicking the link to read the blog entry in the browser isn’t that big a deal. Besides, you can always subscribe to both the blog and twitter feed if you want full content + real-time.
I haven’t fully integrated Twitter into my daily life yet, though I’m
getting there – for example I twittered the
results of my hockey
game last night. But unlike other social software sites, I think I’m
going to be using Twitter regularly. I’m on
Facebook, but
there’s too much “you’ve been bitten by a Vampire!” type spam to really
use it for anything but pure entertainment. Twitter is more like
blogging, where there’s an information exchange with only the people I
subscribe to follow. Also, maybe it’s me, but there doesn’t seem to
be the same stigma if you stop following someone on Twitter compared to
rejecting them as a friend on Facebook.
DevHawk has been “me”, but now it feels like DevHawk @ Twitter will become “me” which leaves my blog to become my endless book. It’s not a bad thing, but it does feel a little strange.
Comments: