ARE YOU IN THE MUMMY BLOGGER ASYLUM?

My love of blogging is bittersweet. It has enabled me to write which I love, but with all things that one falls heavily for, measure needs to employed at some point. Blogging is so the mother of all rabbit holes. It leads to twitter, a Facebook page (don't start me on Google+), a newsletter, instagram, constant website improvements, getting published, interacting in communities, functions, conferences and hours and hours of publicity and marketing and so on and so forth. Writing actually becomes the least of your worries, and then suddenly it becomes a huge worry because you find you have no time to actually do what started the whole thing, that is just tell a story, share an anecdote, talk to the world.

There is definitely so much value in keeping it simple. The complexity can really burn you out of the blogging world as fast as it took you to set up your blogger or wordpress site. But giving up on blogging is not the worst thing that can happen. What is worse is losing touch with real life. Valuing your three-dimensional relationships less, especially those closest to you. You see a bit of attention from a virtual community of people can do crazy things to people's minds. When you are getting compliments from strangers and people want to meet you - you can get a weird sort of invincible out-of-body type feeling that leads you to devaluing the people you actually need the most.

So upon recognising this I decided to write myself some rules, that hopefully will guard against ending up living in a box next to a power outlet at the local wi-fi spot with only my laptop as company.

Any addicts out there got more tips? Please share!

Image background source: http://lady-himiko.deviantart.com

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Is Facebook going bad or moving forward?

As you can probably tell from my smattering of posts about Facebook on every social media network I’m a bit taken with the new Timeline feature. It is so fun and you can read my full rave over at JustB. 

Status updates 2007-style 

One of the cool things I didn’t talk about though was the hilarity of rediscovering your early posts through Timeline. You remember when the status header always had “Nicole is…”? Which was quite limiting if you were fussy about your grammar (not that I was or am, as you can probably tell). Anyway when I saw these scintillating updates I couldn’t stop laughing. My excuse is Social Media was so in its infancy and we didn’t really know what we were doing, ok so maybe some of you did, but as you can see by the below I had no idea!

Is Facebook trying to own our identities? 

The other side I didn’t really cover was the concerns people have raised about privacy. The good news about Timeline is all your posts come over with their current privacy status, so if you have only ever shared photos with friends, or even a specific set of friends that won’t suddenly change. So the only real issue is that posts from your past are now accessible to you and those they were originally shared with, that is unless you go in and remove them, delete them or change their privacy state, all things you can do.

Nobodies more interesting than Celebrities? What? 
In this age though where sharing is being turned into a source of entertainment, nobodies are replacing celebrities who formerly were the only ones that walked that hallowed ground. The new Facebook changes take advantage of this phenomenon and just bring it up to speed with tools like Twitter and Instagram. People like to be followed and now you can select content from your timeline to make public and then offer yourself up to be subscribed to. That way strangers who subscribe to you can receive your public updates in their news feeds.

The Social Media age 
For many this is great news as it gives one access to a greater audience if that’s what you’re after. The down side is the widening of the potential to make social errors, especially ones that may lead a young person in to harm’s way. But that is the case across many other social media tools already including the very controversial Google+ which insists you use your real name! The answer is the world is changing and we need to keep step with it and educate our children on the amazing potential social networks offer while drilling in to them the dangers and the rules that will ensure their safety.

Facebook Timeline goes live on October 1, but you can try it now by following the instructions here. 

What do you think? Is Facebook going bad or moving forward?

©My IdeaLife, 2011, All rights reserved

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