I love the concept of “publish once, reflect everywhere” I love the concept of “change once, reflect everywhere” even more which would be really cool if folks would adopt that. Right now, with some technical skill, we can use RSS, Javascript, curl, XML-RPC, etc to kinda get there. Everyone seems to have a tool to do about 90% of something, just good enough, but doesn’t integrate with anything else easily and so there is a lot of double entry. It gets tedious and away from the promise of technology freeing up our time.
Writing blog posts is fun, but then there is a whole array of bulls**t to do afterwards. Digg, Tweet, delicious, Facebook, LinkedIn, blah, blah, blah each with it’s own set of criteria to submit. (Some of this is automated, I know, but it is WAY too scattered. And, sometimes I don’t want to post to my Facebook profile or posterous or tumblr.) Keeping track of these details well is what makes some really good people really bad at social media.
Another concept that is screwing all this up is maintaining multiple identities. I own various brands/companies in diverse categories. What is appropriate for one may not be for another. This necessitates multiple twitter accounts, Facebook profiles, pages, etc. The developing powers of the Web seem to believe that the only right identity is your own biological one and everything must be collected under one roof, i.e., FriendFeed and the like. Things get easy when you do that, but exceedingly complex when you must maintain multiple identities; not to hide or or defraud, but to keep from confusing folks in different camps.
As I am writing this comment, Disqus is sending me via email comments of other people commenting on this post. I don’t know how to shut that damn faucet off! But I sure as heck know I don’t want the email. I want to read comments here. In my quest for simplicity through automation, I am now a slave to the Disqus rules. (I know there is a simple way, but there is a simple — and radically different way — for EVERY small service with the promise of reducing my fractured, muddy Web.)
While many hands may make light work, many hands connected to many brains connected to many egos and disconnected to many ears makes for a very fractured muddy Web. We’re all trying to improve the process, but talk too much, create too much and listen too little.
In response to Chris Brogan’s Muddy Fractured Web
