2 Apps, 1 Very Happy User

On my phone live many apps. But only two of these make me smile and start in on thisreallylongexplanationofwhyyoumustgetthemtoo. One speaks to the ABC of me (yay communication all the time!), and the other to the OCD (I must have order!).

Fring

See, I'm a very important person. I need to be available to people should they need to plan something, or ask a very important question. My husband, friends and I all have divided loyalties when it comes to which instant messenger we use. And no matter how much I love these people, I am not about to have 14 different clients on my phone or computer. Enter Fring. It's just a simple little app that lets you sign into all of your IM accounts at once. GChat people sit in the same buddy list as AIM and Yahoo! folks. It's a glorious world, and buddies are none the wiser. While typing this blog, my husband and I had a very important conversation, see:

Because I have Fring on my phone, I wouldn't have missed this conversation had I been somewhere more exciting than my living room. Thank God for technology.


StitchMinder
The best free app ever for knitters/yarn people. Is your phone set to automatically go into sleep mode after X minutes? Not when you're using StitchMinder! What? You don't knit? Ok, I'll start from the beginning. In knitting projects, often you'll have a chart to follow, repeating the design in the chart over and over until you want to throw something (this blog post describes how the knitting rage begins for me quite well. Read it later.). Or sometimes you are given a really long list of row-by-row instructions. Sometimes that list has 14 billion rows on it, and if you can't remember if you just finished row 13,789,342 or row 13,789,343 the pattern gets all mucked up and you become violent. Just look at this instruction sheet I started before I knew about StitchMinder. It would make anyone twitch.

What StitchMinder does is allow you to tap the screen as you finish rows, and it remembers even if you shut off the app. When you return to the app, there are your numbers, sitting there like angels, awaiting your next session of knitting. You don't have to make hash marks on paper, or use the silly dot system like I did above.

When my IM buddies are all in one placing using one app, my knitting projects are nice and neat, and my patterns are hash-mark free, it's a beautiful world. Things line up, everything has its place and the knitting rage monster doesn't have to come out and fix things.

SocialMedia Me

I have circles; we all have circles. If you were to narrow down to 5 the things that make me who I am online, you'd get an odd mix. This odd mix, in fact:

The Daytona Beach News-Journal
The newspaper where I spent about 9 years. Most of my Facebook connections are friends and former colleagues I met here. Many have since become like family and most have left the paper, but we're all still connected to it (no matter how much we hate to admit it).

Drake University, and my home town
I have smaller circles -- all roughly the same size -- from my new friends at LSU, my old friends from college at Drake University, and high-school and home-town friends from growing up in DeLand, Florida. This is the second-biggest area where I use Facebook -- as a personal and social tool. I use it to keep in touch with friends (mostly) and some family. 

LSU
Since I married into the LSU Political Science grad student association, this group and I all use Facebook to keep up with each other, plus we use the Groups function to coordinate outings/happy hours/events.


Knitting
My social graph has an element I'm sure most in my class won't have -- a little community called Ravelry. It's not a site that gets a lot of mention in the social media scene, I'm sure. But if you knit, or have anything to do with yarn, you know about it. You logon multiple times a day. Your stash of yarn is categorized and photographed here, you've compiled a much-too-long list of projects of which you may someday complete a fraction, and you've stalked other people's projects to see how certain patterns *really* turn out. It's a closed system, but its users are rabid and incredibly loyal. They don't care that you can't post directly to Facebook from here or Tweet their recent yarn find. Anyone who cares will already be on Ravelry, clicking that little heart-shaped button by your latest creation. Despite that, I still tweet more about knitting and freelancing (more on that below), than I do life in general.
 
Being a freelancer
This is where Twitter comes more into play. I tweet about freelance projects. I also use Twitter to follow people and organizations that relate to my freelancing personality. @ChicagoManual, @MightyRedPen, @MerriamWebster, @APStylebook, @APA_Style, @AmerMedicalAssn are all folks I make a special effort to pay attention to when they appear in my newsfeed.

So what: I need more time to really process what all this means, but for now I'm fairly happy with the way I portray myself out in cyberland. I tend to want to separate certain personalities -- keep the freelancing away from Facebook, and keep Facebook away from anyone who really doesn't know me personally. Will this have to change to brand myself well in the digital-verse? Probably. In the mean time, I'll be contemplating how to give myself a digital make-over while still keeping some of my identities compartmentalized.

Coming later this week: A better blog post than this one.

5 Things I Think I Already Knew

So, there's this thing called a social graph. And, unless you're living under a rock (in which case you're likely not reading this), you have one. Your social graph shows how you are connected to all the rest of us in this virtual, social world. Whether you like it or not. In old school terms, it's the Six Degrees of Separation Game -- involve Kevin Bacon if you must.

So, to get a glimpse of my social graph, I turn to Facebook (who else?). There's this nifty little app called TouchGraph that magically pulls in your info and maps out how each of your friends is connected to you and everyone you know. Here's mine (I'm the big red blob in the middle with a rectangle in the center):

What this shows:

1. I have the majority of my connection from my former workplace, the newspaper.
2. I have a lot of friends, too, through my husband's former workplace, the aeronautical university.
3. High school friends make up the fewest dots.
4. College friends take up fewer circles on the graph, but I know I have more of them than high school friends on Facebook. I'm unsure of the color-coding/grouping on this.
5. The university in my hometown holds a fair number of connections for me, even though I never attended.

What I learned:

• The top-ranked "friend" was my husband (whew!). We look normal to the world. Hooray.
• The person who shares the most connections with me is not my husband, but the woman who sat next to me at work for nearly 9 years. This said a lot to me; it showed just how much what I did influenced who I knew, who I became, and who I associated with.

What I already knew:

• Of course (whew!) my husband would be my number one connection -- I see him every day.
• I know a lot of (former) newspaper people. I consider many as family. Why wouldn't the place where I spent the majority of my time and professional energy generate the most connections? It was a media outlet for goodness' sake, why wouldn't my coworkers also be members of the social media, too? Print people aren't all lame.
• While high school and college generated life-long friendships, I'm not nearly connected to most of them as I am the people who shared more of my adult life. It's true -- school is a time of social growth, but truly only a few stand the test of time (cold, hard fact. Sorry, classmates.). Those standouts rank as the big blue blobs on the social graph.

While it was interesting to see the lines move from friend to friend as I hovered over their name, ToughGraph's at-first creepy look at my life didn't really tell  me too much I didn't already know. What my bigger question (and later blog post) will ask is, how do I go about creating and managing this online identity/social graph/whateveryouwanttocallit that covers my professional, personal, and creative identities?

Two out of three is pretty bad

So I read three articles today. One discussed the differences among Blogger, Tumblr and Wordpress, which was concise and useful. It's the type of article we would have run in the Features section of the paper where I used to work. "Chunky type," some called it -- our editors loved the idea. It brought in the kids, they said. There wasn't much to it, but there didn't need to be.

The second and third took opposite stands; one said blogging is somewhat dying out, its audience marching to social media sites like Twitter. The other said blogging isn't dead so much as it is reverting back to its origin of niche topics. Both had their points, but ultimately I think the in-the-industry writers (i.e. not the <added a space!> 18- to 22-year-olds who are still in college) should reconsider saying "blogging is dead"dead, and rather revisit and redefine what blogging is.

What irked me: In two of the three of these articles, there were typos and/or grammatical errors. Yes, blogging may not be dead and may indeed be going back to the smaller niche areas of expertise where it began, but lordy, you undermine what you're trying to put out there when it's dotted with bad punctuation or misused words.

Edited to add the sentiment that it's hard to be both writer and copy editor.

A is also for Apple

I've always used the Internet as a tool. I use it, I expect it to have what I want, and I get frustrated when what I want isn't accessible in two minutes or less. And after reading Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and "The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet," by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, it seems I'm not in the minority. These were the longest articles I've read on the Internet in I don't know how long. And that's kind of sad considering I'm former newspaper person who encouraged reporters to turn in a shorter version of their stories for the paper and a longer (more golden wordy) version for online.

As much as I hate to admit it, I think I fall on the side of Anderson, who argues narrow and niched apps will overtake the openness of the Web.  With Wednesday's resignation of Steve Jobs, Apple -- with its app-driven gadget empire -- will be the company to watch in the coming year. Will its brand suffer from a changing of the guard, or will it be improved with its new, though handpicked by Jobs himself, leader at the helm? Will we see an iPhone 5 this fall? These are the questions.


Awesome: Self realization. The scholarly part of me -- albeit a small one -- sighs a bit when thinking about how instant-gratificationed we've become. I'm just as guilty as the rest, but I truly believe lounging with a good book and burying my iPhone deep away restores part of my over media-ed soul. So, on a trip I'm taking this weekend, I'll be sure and pack a good book to help foster the kind of reading Carr describes in his concluding graphs as, " ... valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds."

Not Awesome, a sidenote: From a former newspaper designer's standpoint, I found the Anderson-Wolff article difficult to read mainly because of its presentation. Do I read all of one side, then the other?  What's up with the horizontal red lines breaking up the story -- are these different sections, or merely there to break up the sections for Internet readers? Do I go section by section reading left, then right? Don't make me think about how to read your article, Wired. Design it so that thought never even occurs to me.