Ruby Pseudo Wants a Word is quite brilliant. I discovered it last week via psfk and am utterly hooked. The premise is that everyone wants to know what 'The Kids' are up to, so our intrepid investigator Ruby has set out to discover just that. Kindly sharing her discoveries on the blog as she goes. It's the kind of idea I wish I'd thought of. But I didn't. Even if I had, I'd be too shy to approach cool-looking kids without some kind of prior arrangement.
One of Ruby's lines of enquiry is "how do they manage their digital lives?" It's such a great question, and one that feels very pertinent as I'm just beginning to feel mine is tipping out of control.
It all started with this blog. But then one blog wasn't enough, so I got another one and contributing to others. From there came my Flikr, my YouTube, my de.licio.us. All this I could cope with, but that was before Twitter...
Despite my stalling and reservations, I'm now totally enamoured with Twitter (Matt isn't, he's taken to growling at my phone). I like it most at weekends; it's just lovely to hear from everyone going about their weekend business. It really does feel like I'm living in a distributed village. I love the sense of connection it provides and wish my family and offline friends all twittered too - that really would be ace.
And now there's Facebook. I only got round to joining at the weekend, but can already tell that it's the social networking site for me. Given time, I reckon it could become my online hub, overtaking this blog - though I'd need Twitter and Facebook to link first.
I'm happy with my public vs private balance (nothing goes online that I'm not 100% happy with making entirely public). But online vs offline is another matter. Very few of my social group spend as much time online as I do, so it's like living in two different worlds populated by totally different people. I like them both a lot, I just wish they crossed over a bit more - online to off seems to work nicely, but less so the other way round.
Anyway, I have a few questions and would be delighted to hear how the rest of you sort this stuff out:
- How do other people their digital lives (time, priorities, sites and wires)?
- What makes the best online hub? Or is it better to have several?
- How can I encourage offline friends on?
Oh, and just today Faris has posted about distributed identities across different digital platforms and Dino has posted about why he loves Facebook. I used to consider this kind of subject synchronicity spookily coincidental, but have learnt that it's a wonderfully common experience in the blogosphere.
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