Am I Two-Faced? Are You?

Pondering how and whether to integrate or fragment my two selves. As I participate more and more in online social media and networking spaces, I find myself faced with difficult choices. I have so many personas:

1. Librarian
2. Information architect / taxonomist / metadata queen
3. Curator of content at the Resource Center
4. Promoter of social media to nonprofits
5. Social media enthusiast
6. Mom / family member / social being

Some of these could be combined without too much fuss. It wouldn't be horribly jarring for librarians to read about my IA (information architecture) interests, though it might bore the IA community to read about my library stuff. So, OK, combine 1) and 2).

It could make sense to combine my overall resources for community service programs and nonprofits with my specific resources for them about using social media. So, OK, combine 3) and 4).

5 is problematic. Although some do, most of my nonprofit peeps don't want to hear about every little development on friendfeed, or learn about 27 brand new lifestreaming startups. Ditto for my librarian peeps. Some care, most don't. Where do I draw the line? Clearly I'm overthinking this.

But 6 is problematic too. So many people encourage us to be ourselves online, share a bit of our personal lives and we become more human to potential clients, bosses, funders, or future colleagues. I don't have a problem with this in theory, but often the joy of online social spaces is that people can become quite intimate (and no, I'm not talking cybersex here, but simply confessions, sharing, revealing aspects of one's personal life, engaging with emotional honesty). It is difficult to control who does and doesn't have access to that world.

Because these concerns were present in my mind, I initially started down the road of having separate online presences in several places. On YouTube, I have an account for me, and one for my work (which is meant literally to represent our project, the Resource Center, not just work-related stuff). On delicious, I did the same, but that is becoming a huge pain in the butt. The resulting workflow has been that if I happen to be logged in as myself, I add a tag which alerts me that I should port the link over to the Resource Center account. Can you spell "inefficient"? Yet, it is way too unprofessional to send people to /lnorvig/serviceresources instead of /serviceresources AND, I do need to add organized and specific tags to everything on /serviceresources. Curses.

Then came Squidoo. I have two accounts there also. One represents persona 4., the other is persona 6 plus an experiment (quickly abandoned) to see if Squidoo could actually bring in any revenue.

Now I'm starting to think the Resource Center needs to be on Twitter and Facebook. And I know I should just consider that part of my work, like I would "become" the Resource Center during the day and hang out in social media spaces as that entity, but I already feel two-faced enough as it is.

How about you? Are you two-faced? How do you blend or separate the personal and the professional online?

One Night, Two Earthquakes

A weird thing happened on FriendFeed tonight. OK, two things. First was an earthquake and I got to see everyone posting about it in real time. Not that weird, but a true expression of the power of social media/networking/microblogging - whatever you want to call it. A few hours later FriendFeed had its own earthquake. As Paul Bucheit posted:

“Vimeo changed the ids and urls used in their feeds, so all vimeo content is now showing up a second time. For unrelated reasons, some old YouTube videos are now being picked up as well (but these are not dups). The good news is that they are all very entertaining :)”

No, definitely not dupes, because these were videos people had favorited a LONG time ago - in some cases up to a year ago, I believe. And for some folks, that meant back when maybe they weren't using YouTube in a socially networked way. Back when they were saving "very entertaining" videos of a certain, shall we say, personal nature.

One of the Friendfeeders happened to find some videos that a person with a very public status surely would not have wanted anyone to know he watched. The mood got somber as all of us online at the time realized that revealing this gaffe could ruin this person's career. Yup, it was a weird night on Friendfeed, and a classic example of the dangers of open, transparent lifestreaming.

UPDATE: I went back and looked at this poor schmuck's friendfeed a few days later and realized: The guy had never posted directly to friendfeed and is clearly not an active user. He is subscribed to only three people. Only one person is subscribed to him. His feed consists of one page total with 21 tweets dating back to October 2007 and two stumble posts, plus the three errant youtube favorites. I kinda doubt if he even remembers he has a friendfeed account. But eventually that page is going to become googleable and bite him in the ass. Hard.

“I don’t have time for this.”

Apparently I say that a lot, as my three-year-old has incorporated it into his repertoire. I don’t have time to fiddle with Blogger (wish it was still in @ev’s capable hands …). Tried to port my dusty, rusty old blog from old place to new , but my template options are either drag and drop with no control or full on HTML and CSS. Nope, “I don’t have time for this.”

On a related note, the Office 2007 version of Word tried to get me to post to my blog using Word. At the END of the setup process, it informs me that people could see my username and password while Word sends the information. Ummm, wish you woulda mentioned that up front. And may I add, "I don't have time for this."

How I Use Socialmedian

Once I immersed myself in the ocean, I decided to go for socialmedian, too. My initial reaction is this: I don't like being scattered. I've committed to Delicious. I've been drinking the friendfeed kool-aid because I like the way it facilitates conversations. If a link is worth saving, I'm going to save it to Delicious. Thus, I see no point in "clipping" something on socialmedian. I click through to the actual link, evaluate the information, and bookmark it on Delicious if it's worthy. But I still use socialmedian to find stuff, and mostly, to watch the progression of yet another service.

Diving in a Little Deeper

Although I diligently added the social media and tech a-listers on Twitter, I oh-so-quickly became disillusioned with it. The lack of threading just made it downright annoying.

OTOH, once I used a few a-listers as a jumping off point (not blindly adding people, but rather stopping to evaluate their blogs, friendfeed posts, comments, and "likes") on friendfeed I oh-so-quickly became addicted to it.