The web as a personal publishing platform

I may be sowing the seeds of our downfall by offering the following:

Wordpress, Twitter, Delicious, Pownce, Tumblr, FriendFeed, Seesmic. You’ve got a computer, you’ve got internet access, you’ve got ideas, opinions, stories to tell. In the past you may have written a letter to the editor. Or maybe you called the local newspaper to inform them of your story. Maybe someone else placed the call on your behalf. Perhaps you’ve complained about the lack of coverage by the local media of your neighborhood or cause or high school team. In today’s digital landscape those complaints, ideas, opinions can be translated, digitized and shared.

Here’s my recipe for a personal publishing platform (this maybe old news to some of you):

Wordpress.com – You can get a free hosted blog. Create an account. Pick a catchy blog name. Customize your theme. Add some widgets to the side bar including a blog roll. (also see Blogger and Tumblr)

Twitter.com – A so-called micro-blogging tool. Lets you post short updates (up to 140 characters) about, well pretty much anything. From the most mundane to links to interesting sites. It’s really all about the network. Grow your network with like-minded individuals and you will be able to use your network to get recommendations, ask question, etc. (also see Pownce)

Delicious.com – A social bookmarking service. Let’s you bookmark, tag and categorize websites. Again, it’s all about the network. Find other like-minded individuals that use Delicious and you will have access to all the sites that they bookmark, tag and categorize. Pretty great if  you are looking for information about a specific subject. You can use Google and your Delicious network.

Seesmic – Think of it as a video version of Twitter. Using video, either a built-in camera like the one on my MacBook Pro or an external camera, you can start discussions, ask questions and seek recommendations about anything. Again, the network lets you tap the collective brain. And the video aspect makes it a little more personal/connected. (also see 12Seconds)

FriendFeed – Is Twitter on steroids. It lets you generate a stream of all your online activity. It lets you connect your various web tools such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. and displays you activity to your selected network of friends. It’s a great way to be introduced to websites and ideas that you might have missed otherwise.

Facebook – Well Facebook is Facebook. A prototypical social network. Again you can find like-minded individuals as well as long lost friends and share information.

The great thing is that you can integrate all of these into your blog. You can alert people on Twitter when you created a new blog post. You can embed your Seesmic video into your blog. In fact, you can customize your commenting feature to accept Seesmic video comments. Most of these can also be integrated into your Facebook account. You eventually are able to tap into the collective knowledge of not only your immediate friends and contact but also of their immediate friends and contact, and so on. Yes often times you find yourself having to filter out a lot of noise but the upside is well worth it.

If you have any questions or any suggestions for other online tools please comment below. Or video comment if you’d like.

Here is my personal network. I also use some of these for my work at the U-B:

Friendfeed

Twitter

Delicious

Seesmic

P.S. – Here is a nice blog post by Ryan Sholin detailing ways that we as a media company might use Twitter. Which touches on a subject I hope to blog about soon. The idea that journalism is not the product but the process. And while we must deliver the end product in new ways we cannot forget that the process must evolve as well.