socializing on the intertubes

For someone who was painfully shy for most of her life, I've got a bigger presence on the intertubes than I ever expected to.

I had a book review website back in the late 1990's, but I kept it almost completely on topic. It had a lot of views, relatively speaking (50,000+ wasn't too bad back then), and it helped me meet some authors I've always admired, helped me find some books I'd've probably not discovered otherwise, and was generally a lot of fun. Then life got busy and sometimes chaotic, and I let the site go dormant. And finally pulled it down all together.

Now, 11 years after that book review site was in its heyday, I've got this blog here and my photostream over at flickr. They're really for two different things entirely, so having both makes sense to me. I have varying layers of privacy filters over at flickr, though most of my photos are public. Here, obviously, the blog doesn't require an account or special permissions to view it.

I twittered for a brief time, because the concept is an interesting one, but I only know one or two people on twitter, and they don't post much, so it seemed a bit silly to be twittering into a void.

I've got some friends over at Live Journal and MySpace. People I know from way back when, mostly. I created an account on MySpace so I could get added as a friend to my friend's pages, since they're generally private. And I do like that bands and such have info there that's easy to find. For instance, that's how I found out about the Peter Murphy show coming up in Minneapolis next month. So I personalized my page a bit and I peek over there now and then to see what's up.

I couldn't post comments for my friends at Live Journal using my OpenID because the one I use is several versions newer than Live Journal can handle. Didn't see any reason to make journal posts of my own to LJ, though. But there's one feature I've discovered that I do like about Live Journal that makes it worth posting over there every now and then. Ok... two features.

I like that I can mark individual posts as viewable by friends only. And I like that there's a friends view that lets me see recent posts by all (all 3 a.t.m.) of my friends in one spot. And the interface, while somewhat outdated, is infinitely preferable to the chaos of MySpace. Hmm... that's 3. Whatever.

So I've changed my mind about not posting to LJ. I'm going to, every so often, be making posts over there that are just for my LJ friends' viewing.

If you're a friend of mine -- as in, I know you well enough to email you privately on a semi-regular basis, or we actually know each other outside of cyberspace -- and you have a LJ account, let me know and I'll add you to my friends. For that matter, I run my instant messenger when I'm not working, or playing World of Warcraft, assuming I remember to turn the thing on. The same set of people are invited to shoot me an email for that contact info.