This will not be one of those brilliant “to the point” posts. Sorry. I plead the subhead of this blog… Stick with me, though…I do have something important to share that I learned today, which I’ll summarize here as “thanks, social media, I never thought of that before.”
First, an apology for the lack of posts. One of the difficulties of running a no employee business and being a “part time” (yes, those quotes are deliberately sarcastic…but don’t get me wrong, I love my church ministry) church musician, and having a life away from a computer, is that everything goes fine until something unexpected happens. Over the past 10 days several friends, and people close to friends, passed on. It reminds, once again, about the finite nature of life.
So I knew that I hadn’t written for a while, and I was doing my once-in-a-while pattern of marking time avoidance that often comes with a postponed task, today, by doing some “routine maintenance” things…one of which is doing a “friend or follow” search. I’m at the difficult following 2000 point on Twitter, and I can’t follow some of the people I want to until I get more followers, or reduce the people I follow. [BTW-you can help me...follow me if you are not already. I can't promise to follow you back yet, because I have to get past the 2000 mark, but if you email me or leave a comment below, I'll do my best to follow you back as soon as I can.] I started by organizing the people I follow according to the last time they posted. Then I scan through and/or read the current twitter stream of those who seem to be candidates for unfollowing. Got to the second one, and man…do I know why I follow @Steve_Campbell.
[full disclosure: here's my criteria...if I visit your current twitter stream and I don't find anything that interests me, and I don't know you personally, or I have no history to establish that you write interesting things, then I unfollow...and if you read on, you'll find, as I did today, why that is the case...]
But see, there’s the problem, and I have heard this before, and perhaps you have as well: the more people you follow, the more the information from any one person gets lost in the ever-speedier twitter stream. And if you follow a bunch of interesting people, it can become a full time job just to read all the interesting things that the interesting people are producing. And if you are like me, and come from a long line of people who think that a lot of things are interesting, you can see the problem…which leads me back to my apology for not writing more. Apps like TweetDeck , which I use, help, but first you have to identify somebody as worthy of their own column.
But that’s not why you’re reading, is it? One of Cambell’s links took me to this blog about minimalist living (yes, I find that interesting). It has an “improve your blog” framework, but there is much, much more there. I found the bit about “live an interesting life and then write about it” struck a real chord. It explains why I choose to read the things I do…and as I am closer to the end of my life than the beginning, I am trying to be more picky about what I’m interested in…although it doesn’t always work.
It also explains why I’m writing this blog. I’ve been fortunate to have (I can’t say “had” yet, because I’m still alive) an interesting life. Some of it is being in the right place at the right time, but some of it is because I’m interested in so many things (I’m a plate spinner…more detailed personal info here). And one of the things I’m fascinated by at the moment is the content of Jeff Jarvis‘ book What Would Google Do (and, to put the link in, I went to Jarvis’ site, and got distracted by reading this, which makes all sorts of sense, even though I’m not a Howard Stern fan).
If you’re still following (I know I can talk in tangents…ask my family), here’s the point: EVERYBODY has an interesting life. It is just that, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, it depends upon what your definition of interesting is. And a lot of it is on the internet…and you can be too. Which is why I’m stopping this post and going back to reading…oh wait, I was friend or following…sigh…
Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.
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