Thing 22: Keeping Current

I feel like I'm signing up for an eternity of information overload...

As I was following the links provided for continuing our learning curve, I looked at the Blue Skunk Blog and had to laugh at the latest blog entry by Doug Johnson. He says he thought of Mr. Creosote after the latest invitation he received to join another social network.

For those of you who may not know or remember, Mr. Creosote was an archetypal glutton played by Terry Jones in the 1983 Monty Python movie The Meaning of Life. Creosote eats, vomits and eats more until a final mint, as I remember, causes his entire body to horrifically explode.

I am worried that Diigo just might be that final 2.0 mint. At what point does one's social networking time commitment become so consuming that one figuratively explodes?

I am therefore adopting the same rule I apply to adding books to my bookshelves, clothing to my closet and RSS feeds to my reader - for every item I add, I toss one as well.

I believe it to be the only path of sanity and survival. Entirely too much of my life is already taken up by trying to keep up.

Ooh, I too think this might be a good idea!

Unfortunately, I realize that keeping up with the new also means keeping up with which of the old have been merged, morphed or tossed in the waste bin.

Frankly, I'm not sure whether I'll keep up this blog, although I do want to find ways to keep talking with folks. Perhaps it will be through a social network instead of a blog. This is actually the second blog I've had. I started the first after I finished my novel and found that I was terrified of the thought of anyone actually reading it. So I started a blog in order to "train myself" to know what it would feel like to know that total strangers were reading and evaluating my words.

What actually happened is that, like my novel, my mother and partner were pretty much the only ones who read it. I missed that whole marketing part of it, I guess.

I think this is the reality of blogs: there are some that "make it" but the vast majority have a very limited readership. It takes a lot of work to make a blog interesting and relevant.

The good thing is that after going through the 23 Things, I know of several avenues other than blogging that I can use to stay current and to communicate with peers.