nomadic_audio

trollmaster

i've noticed for some time in all the social networks that i've participated in over the years that there is a select group of participants who tend to attract trolls as if they were magnetized, now granted it's usually the abrasive curmudgeonly a-listers who bring out those with a trollish tendency because rather than ignore them like the rest of us, their ego seems to require that they debate with them - now some social environments (like friendfeed) have very useful blocking functionality so that you don't see a trolls activities and they won't see yours - but you have to first identify the trolls, and it seems these magneticly popular folk are the best at accumulating them and bringing out their true trollish nature for all else to see - it occurs to me that there's a new online role in the making here - trollmaster, an online personality that simply by participating can rid any community of its trolls - this would be very useful as new social networking environments startup, conspiracy theorists are always claiming that a-listers only use and talk up these new social sites because they are paid - forget about that, i say openly pay them to participate and rid the site of all its trolls - long live the trollmasters, pissing off and ridding the web of all trolls so we don't have to ;)

hey subscribers to nomadic audio

i'll still will be posting here of course but if you really want to track what i'm up to online as i mentioned in an earlier post, i suggest you follow me on friendfeed or swurl - that way you can get all the other services i interact w/ in one interface or via one rss feed...

see these two posts from my other blog for additional background: changes & personal soa...

post from iphone app store for typepad

this is a test - looks like all the basics but no html capabilities

friendfeed twitters my swurl

for those of us that adopt new tech early and often, such as social networking and lifestreaming tools, things have been pretty interesting lately - while twitter has been growing in popularity it has also been extremely unstable, to the point of user abandonment - along comes friendfeed which i first started using as a presence aggregator - a place that i could subscribe to everything my many online friends do whether its twitter, blogging, photos, bookmarks, netflix, whatever of the 41 services they chose to integrate into their friendfeed flow - a really neat platform that optimizes keeping up with the many different communities i participate in online - it appears to those new to the platform to be a chaotic mess, a sort of rss aggregretor on steriods, but then again its also a very dynamic communication platform that allows commenting just like blogs have and "rating" something/anything via a "like" which allows those who subscribe to you to discover the things you've liked algorithmically even if they don't subscribe to the original person via a pretty neat friend of a friend (foaf) feature - there are lots of other configurable options in friendfeed which others have done a really good job of chronicling so i won't...

what i really wanted to go through in this post is the differences between the communication styles that exist in twitter & friendfeed, from my perspective of course - which could be very different for others - this is the way i explain the communication practices in twitter and friendfeed to folks new to these tools: i use an escalator analogue...

this image shows three escalators side by side, the one on the left is going down and the two on the right are going up - twitter is like the conversation that occurs between two people passing each other in opposite directions on the up and down escalators - its brief, short and cryptic - while friendfeed is like the conversation that occurs while folks are traveling in the same direction on the escalator, if the conversation that starts while traveling up or down together is interesting it can continue either up into the building or out into the street - also the friendfeed conversation could have the potential to include multiple participants because you're going in the same direction while twitter feels more like many, many ships that pass in the night - i still use twitter but i prefer the depth and level of experience that happens in friendfeed...

one other presence aggregator that i've recently enjoyed exploring is swurl, it has a lot of similarities to friendfeed but is more of a record of activity for me than a place i'd live in - i especially like the timeline view, my impression is that folks will use swurl to track or locate elements that have been contributed to a lifestream & will use friendfeed to interact w/ others while lifestreaming...

personally, twitter is something that i'll decrease fulltime participation in as my time & community of interest transitions to friendfeed (or some other more robust social media environment to be named later) - i used to like whales ;)

my accounts are: friendfeed, swurl & twitter follow if interested (friendfeed is what i recommend)...