No, sweet & silly Belle has nothing to do with the subject of this post — except that I made that image for a Facebook friend, and haven't done Friday Cat Blogging here for ages.
Watermark used to be the center of my online life (which is much of my Real Life.) Now, there is Twitter and Facebook and Identi.ca. Also Friendfeed, which I have but rarely use. Also many others which I have but rarely use. Oh, and Open Salon, another neglected site.
Watermark posts show up in some of those places, and comments happen away from the original post. The conversation gets scattered and fractured. The center is spread thin. Too thin? Sometimes I think so.
But the spread also brings more people in. People who don't come here, notice a post on Facebook and respond there, and vice versa. More and more I use Watermark to post my poems, and other places to play and converse and post links. Lately my energy has allowed for one or two poems a week, a bit of play on Facebook, and that's about it.
I've been particularly frustrated about links that interest or amuse me. I've been posting them to Facebook, but not here, since I don't want to overwhelm Watermark readers with too-frequent or irrelevant posts. So — I made a widget. It's there on the sidebar, for those who are interested, and those who aren't can ignore it.
I might even start throwing in some cat links there.
So one frustration is solved; I feel better about providing links to Watermark readers as well as Facebook friends. But I still don't have a center, one place where conversations are gathered together. Maybe this doesn't matter. Maybe it bothers only me?
How do you handle this? Is it a problem for you, or just how things work these days?
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