My rate of posting (well considered and edited) blog posts has fallen off since so much of the “conversation” takes place on Twitter & Facebook. Often the posts I do make are collections of references to links in tweets and FB posts – where the thread of any argument is heavily compromised by the short snippet language of the conversational contributions. Time as always is the scarce resource in good writing.
I need two separate apps. Blogging as it is in WordPress and Medium, and a “BookMarking” app that clicks on links found in any browser or social media and “logs” them in a single post (say by day or by tag) – published to a different blog channel from the main blog writing project. These become resources, inputs, references for other posts but do not take up valuable time in collecting annotating and organising so they can be found later.
Is this del.ici.ous ? Or is there a newer tool that integrates better with other social media and blogging tools? Storify works for tweets where you can predict (and use) a tag in advance but manual chore if not, and anyway Twitter hash-tagging should be better automated – especially in a thread that already has a tag? A cross-platform tagging and bookmarking tool that collects all such tagged bookmarks into one object.
(Also need to streamline how WordPress and Medium work together. Integration is a little primitive so far – publish once / no auto-updates. Good for proper edited “essays” but messy for more interactive conversational stuff. Can be addressed once the bookmarking is sorted.)
[Update – delicious.com is in a state of re-building since its acquisition.]
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[Post Notes – After @CliveAndrews suggested I look at IFTT (If This Then That) channel / event / routing tool, possibilities look very interesting, though not quite the “in-browser bookmarking” metaphor I was originally looking for.
As well as having experimented with Delicious, and using RSS with feedreaders and WordPress plug-ins to communicate with Medium, I have made extensive use of dlvr.it to connect channels before. In fact I use it continuously and invisibly to connect my WordPress post-and-update-and-comment interaction to Twitter and Facebook, although I have most of the filtered-automation currently switched-off except new WP posts to TW. Too much noise but very powerful.
IFTTT looks very like dlvr.it, but like WP it has user community open-source “recipes” switching between hundreds of events and channels. (How do they stop interminable loops? That was always my prediction for web overload. Post to Facebook auto-posts to Twitter auto-posts to Facebook auto-posts … etc.)
Particularly neat – for a simple geek like me – is it can simply send any transaction to a Google Spreadsheet …. Not the worlds most sophisticated web database, but at least everything and anything is bookmarked and available for searching and sorting any way you like, and bulk tagging actions using the spreadsheet functionality, all in a transparently accessible file. Wonder if it can round trip – always a telling test of integration? Import into spreadsheet, manipulate, and re-export to a blog or social media micro-blog. That might be the killer app for my needs?]