My personal site’s landing page is basically just a picture and links out to this blog and the other social media profiles below. I used to include a Friendfeed badge that aggregated most of what I post elsewhere on the web. But all the decontextualized information was overwhelming, and not really of use to anyone but me, so I’ve suspended my lifestreaming experiment.
It’s built in WordPress, which I use on the suggestion of the editor of Gawker. I love this platform and am gradually migrating my entire online presence onto it.
Social networks
Like everybody I know, I’m on Facebook. I’m not wild about the privacy situation or the walled-garden philosophy, but right now there’s no better way for me to be in touch with people.
I love Twitter. It continues to suggest new uses for itself.
For professional networking I use LinkedIn.
Data gathering
I use Flickr for image blogging and visually outlining my book. Flickr is one of my favorite web services out there, it has a world-class user interface.
I do my bookmarking, research and note-taking with Delicious. For a while, Delicious was the hippest thing on the social web, but it’s been suffering from neglect since Yahoo bought it a few years ago. It continues to be super useful, but it isn’t evolving in exciting new directions like Twitter or Flickr. I daydream about the day when its collective users buy it from Yahoo and turn it into an open-source nonprofit service like Wikipedia.
I play around a little with Tumblr. Right now I mostly just use it to reblog pop-cultural stuff. It’s an attractive platform, one I’d recommend to any newcomer to blogging.
My major claim to internet fame is the Michael Jackson sample map. It’s been viewed over a hundred thousand times, and has appeared in The State, on the MTV and VH1 blogs, MSNBC’s Clicked, Rachel Maddow’s Map Room and on MJ’s official site.
