12 July 2009

Can't be bothered to maintain another blog

It's almost the end of the academic year 2008; 2009 is coming on the 1st of August. I was reorganising all sorts of article files in my computer, which happens regularly, more or less twice a semester. I suppose it is human nature to categorise things into groups, either for preservation and easy reference or due to obsession with order.

The re-sorting process usually takes a couple of hours, even a whole afternoon because sometimes it is difficult and thus time-consuming to decide to which folder an article should be assigned. However, another reason for the slow process is that from time to time I would be distracted by some entertaining or inspiring items, which I just can't ignore but have to read again.

I found an interesting item about blogging, which I collected last October from a BBC blog site. The author argues that although 'Twitter, Flickr and Facebook make blogs look so 2004', what we are seeing now is 'the development of a mixed economy, where blogging has many forms, professional, amateur, micro and mega.'

I don't mind if, as he points out, 'our attention span is now so short that we can't read more than the 140 characters in a Tweet or the one line status update you see on Facebook', but I would definitely be drained of physical as well as mental resources if, in response to friends' kind invitations, I joined all the social networking websites, added all the third-party applications, played all the mini-games and updated my personal profiles and whereabouts.

I've joined MySpace, then Facebook, then Windows Live Spaces and then Wretch (a Taiwanese community website), and turned down invitations to Twitter and Plurk.

I feel uncomfortable to sign up for a networking site, a community or a blog site but dismiss it later. As a result, what I would do now is creating an entry or simply giving a line beneath the title banner, for example:
I don't use Windows Live Space. Visit my blog at Blogger.
or
Just can't be bothered to maintain another blog. Interested to know more about me? Check out Principal Wei's Weblog.
I am sure there will be more online social network services featuring more unprecedented applications, but I don't think I would follow the trend.

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