Blogging About Blogging

As an X'er, and one without a smart phone to boot, I find myself with a strange, tweener kind of relationship with social media. In between Gen Y and the Boomers, we X'ers can go either way on Twitter, Facebook, and the like. As this blog is just as much documentation for me to look back on as information for others to ponder, I thought I'd use today's post to describe what I do and where I am on the Internets.

Circa 2010, my swath seems bigger than it actually is, because of the way things can get automatically posted and reposted. I keep a personal blog called "Huang Kid Khronicles," and a professional blog called "The Musings of an Urban Christian," and I post my videos to my YouTube page. (I used to post my pics to Flickr but stopped doing so, I think either because it would have cost money, or because the interface was too clunky; but perhaps both have changed since I stopped doing this?) And that's it.

But thanks to the magic of automatic posting and reposting, you can find this stuff in all sorts of places. At LinkedIn and Brazen Careerist, you can read "Musings." At Facebook, you can read "Musings" and watch my YouTube videos. At Twitter, you can find links to "Musings," "Khronicles," and my YouTube videos. And at Google Buzz, you can find links to all three as well, plus my Twitter posts, meaning you see two of everything there.

In other words, I don't actually use these sites that often. Occasionally, I'll go to Facebook to see what my friends are up to. And I'm a serial collector of friends on Facebook and connections at LinkedIn; per Malcolm Gladwell's reference to "the strength of weak ties," I can't tell you how often I have benefited from information provided by or asked of from someone who I would not consider a close friend but who I know well enough to be virtually linked to.

As noted above, I think this kind of online behavior places me squarely between Gen Y and the Boomers. I try to engage with social media and use it to my benefit. But I use it in a very old-school, analog way: my posts are thought through instead of stream-of-consciousness, I don't do anything real-time, and I don't participate in many online conversations. For that matter, I've never used Yelp, Skype, or Digg; I still don't know how RT or hashtags work on Twitter; and I know that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and yet apparently it is not simple enough for me to know how to use.

Time and temperament constrain me to this level of engagement at this juncture, and only the future knows how I'll age with this process over time. Although you probably shouldn't hold your breath waiting for me to tweet my way through each day; the more ubiquitous the grid becomes, the more I'll likely want to guard my time off it.