Tonight I've mostly been working on Chapters 26 and 27 of Mages, mostly clearing out some outdated and wordy speculation by Fayubi about the spirit attack. Incidentally, the page count for the overall trilogy went back up to 1176 when I recounted Chapter 26. Evidently I'd moved a scene into there from an earlier chapter. Mystery solved - the old page count was 1177. Oops! Now I've recounted 27 and the page count is up to 1180. Mystery unsolved. How can I cut so much text and end up with a longer book?I also wrote Part Two of Later This Somewhere, finally, in the form of a letter from Jace back to Sandy about the weird theatre Sandy found. Aside from that, I spent some time messing around with a few social networking sites for no good reason.
So okay, these social networking things have their uses. People like connecting with each other through sticking virtual pins on a Google map, browsing each other's photos, seeking out other fans of Inigo Montoya's speech to Count Ruger, checking out blogs at random, and on and on. But really, I don't understand how anyone can follow more than one or two of these online services. Heck, I can't begin to read all the blog entries by online friends whose blogs I consider well-written and enjoyable, no matter how much I cut back on that list. Who has time for blog jogging and also Twitter and Flickr and Frappr and Flixter and MyBlogLog and BlogExplosion and the school reunion sites and MySpace and whatever sites are out there? Add the quiz sites and the wikis, the personality tests and the dating sites, and it's clearly possible to spend eighteen hours a day, every day, just playing around with Web 2.0 time wasters.
Nevertheless, I signed up for MyBlogLog, on the basis of a widget on Carly's blog Ellipsis, which lists recent visitors. I hope that those of you who are signed up with MyBlogLog will join the Mavarin community, if only so the widget on my page doesn't continue to show nothing and nobody. I'm very interested in seeing who stops by, even if you don't feel the need to comment.
This MyBlogLog also connects to Twitter, something a few of you use, and the site I understand the least. Twitter wants to know what we're all doing every moment of every day. Whatever for? I don't find my own actions all that interesting on a moment to moment basis, let alone everyone else's. I posted eight updates on the thing tonight, basically just so my most recent was no longert several months old. Really, though, who cares? The only news of significance on there was the new Jace and Sandy entry on Messages and tonight's writing update, both of which I've mentioned here.
Yow, it's almost 2 AM. Despite this morning's lie-in, I'd better start heading bedward.
Karen
(listed as Mavarin on a social networking site near you!)
3 comments:
Hey Karen
I think you will like MyBlogLog, it is excellent for knowing who has been visiting, and making new blogging contacts. Not to mention the tally of hits and their origin. Good to hear you have been getting some rest.
whelp, I don't do mybloglog.. but you KNOW i come by and read! sheesh.
It depends on your interests and time. I try a lot of services to see what they're like, but I don't use most of them after the first few days.
I love flickr. It's my main social network after blogging. I've gotten together with a couple of people I met there for photo shoots. I have 3 of my own flickr groups now. It's fun.
I use MyBlogLog the way it was intended when it started, for stats. I check it before bed.
I use Google Docs to write collaboratively with friends.
I use Twitter, but not as much as some. It's in my gmail as a chat box and I post to it when I feel like it. I like keeping up with some folks more than others. I really enjoy David Hewlett's tweats, especially his brief teases from the Stargate Atlantis set!
I did a post about Twitter on The View from Here. It's great for a variety of things. One woman posts daily the first lines of books for folks to guess. The line is a link to the book on Amazon. There are a lot of mashups using the service, too, for all sorts of things. I like using it with my blog feeds, so people can get my blog feeds on Twitter (through something called Twitterfeed).
I keep my links in del.icio.us and every now and then, I check other people's links there for things that might interest me.
That really is mostly it. Reading blogs and looking at photos take up the bulk of my online time.
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