Perhaps it is the novelty value, perhaps it is the sense that on Facebook I am addressing friends while on this blog I am mostly addressing people I don’t know but the impulse that would once have sent me off here to post little observations on everyday life and news items seems to be being increasingly fulfilled by status updates and the occasional wall posting over there.
When I started blogging I didn’t really think about who my readers might be. When I did start thinking it might be useful to be able to mix private matters with public ones there wasn’t much available except LiveJournal that would give me that kind of control and I quickly discovered that most of my friends are casual enough Internet users not to bother setting up an LJ identity in order to be able to keep up with me and my doings. But Facebook seems to be drawing in a wide enough net that what I write feels like it is going to a substantial number of the people I want to be reaching. Even my brother is on it (though naturally enough my father isn’t there… yet…) and my father, not wishing to be left out, has just joined!
The main problem with Facebook is that there is no way to make posts completely public — the reader *must* be a member of Facebook to read it.
It’s one of the nastier “data silos” out there.
Comment by Reid — 10 September 2007 @ 5:27 pm
You know, that little BlogFriends app in facebook puts my friends who blog into a little list there, feeds me the headlines, and lets me keep visiting their external blogs.
But the question of audience and how we assume intimate or open spaces, and all that, is awfully interesting.
Comment by Gail Williams — 11 September 2007 @ 3:26 am
Well it’s not as if there aren’t a million ways to publish stuff publicly if you want to. It’s places to publish stuff selectively that are lacking…
Comment by David Brake — 11 September 2007 @ 12:17 pm