First name’s “Jason,” which was very popular in and around the year I was born. :(

I keep trying to think of some short phrase that incorporates “Wood,” but nothing sounds exactly “professional.” *snicker*

I own the .co.uk for my first intial plus my last name, and took the “Google, Google for everything” approach to hosting. Mostly just wanted the email address for giving out to potential employers, but it means I feel I ought to put something on the website more than the half-baked Blogger page (with approximately 1 post saying “so what does this button do?”) that’s currently there.

Not sure what to put there, and couldn’t really figure out Google Sites terribly well. Suppose I could turn it into a landing page, but my Facebook/Twitter are both heavily locked down and also not something I really want to share. Don’t want to be one of those people posting “to the world” rather than to the people I know. Suppose I could try to put together a little personal homepage of some sort, but I don’t have much of a history or body of work to shout about.

Well.. Diaspora is buggy, lacking important features and in some aspects hardly usable.
But still.. it’s currently sufficient and since many people from C3D2 (Chaos Computer Club Dresden, the local Hackerspace) and IRC hang around there, its pretty much the platform that i use most (far more then twitter and the likes).

The reader-sharing function had one important difference to the current version via Google+: it was usable.
With share, i just typed “shift+s” and was done, comments could have been integrated better, but it was sufficient. Now i would have to use the mouse, click share, type in text, press enter and then reselect the reader window before i could continue navigating via keyboard.
With all this hassle, it was easier for me to switch the platform for sharing links completely.

@ icebrain:

Oh, I forgot about Stack Overflow and similar sites. In fact some services, like Masterbranch will actually use your Stack Overflow reputation in your profile, which is neat.

@ StDoodle:

True. Smiths and Woods of the world may have a hard time making a personal domain happen. Although sometimes you may get lucky and be able to register firsnamelastname.tld if at least your parents decided to give you a less common name. Which is all the more reason to buy your last-name domain if it’s available. You may not have use for it, but your kids may.

@ Greg:

I added you to my Google Reader and followed you on Twitter. :)

You make an interesting point about blogging being pushed out by social media. I lamented this very point myself at different times. Blogging ain’t cool no more. When I first got the inkling of an idea of starting a blog, it was the hottest buzzword on the web. Everyone was blogging. Bloging, podcasting and starting to vlog and it seemed like a brand new world out there. Nowadays most of the 1000+ blogs in my Google Reader are dead.

Every once in a while I go through them and cull the ones that have been silent for a while. It’s a bit depressing.

But then again, this is sort of par for the course for online things. I have been around long enough to be able to recognize the cycle. Every once in a while a buzzword or a concept captivates the internet and drives it into a memetic fervor for a few years. Then the interest fades, and people start chasing the next big thing. Social media replaced blogging as the buzzworthy new medium mostly because it lowered barrier to entry for online publishing.

But I don’t think it could replace blogging completely. For one, I don’t think I could accomplish what I did here at TI via social media. Somehow along my blogging career I have managed to attract a group of really smart, and insightful people who comment here regularly. This was mostly thanks to few lucky breaks – being on digg and reddit, being linked by other tech blogs, etc.

Social media and blogs both give average internet users a platform for publishing their thoughts but they differ in the scope:

– Blog lend themselves to long-form, thought out articles while social media tends to favor the more immediate, and short information busts

– Social networks are walled gardens perfect for impromptu sharing personal information with varying degrees of privacy. You use them for chit-chat, and conversations. Blogs are soap boxes you use for public speech – you use them to pontificate and preach (usually to the choir).

– Blogs tend to be topical, whereas social networks are personal.

So in a way, social media may be pushing out the “personal blog” but not the more structured blogs with established focus, and theme. Which is not a bad thing. The silly thing about the blogging explosion in early 00′ was that people used the medium to talk about their cats, their breakfast or how they hate the morning traffic. Since then, that sort of thing got pushed into social media. Blogs that stayed on the battlefield had focus and purpose beyond the “let me tell you about the crappy day I’ve had” formula.

@ Dr. Azrael Tod:

How do you like Diaspora? Do people actually use it? Like more people than Google+?

I have never used the sharing function in Reader much. It sucks they removed it, but I can kinda see why. It’s part of their push to integrate G+ into fucking everything. You can more or less get the sharing functionality back by setting up G+ profile, and publicly sharing the posts on your profile.

well..
there is mainly my blog/domain where everything that i want to keep forever takes place. But most things there are kept in german.
Regarding Social Networks, i use mainly twitter (@drazraeltod) and Diaspora* (drazraeltod@pod.geraspora.de).

Until Q4 last year i used Google Reader _extremely_ active for sharing newsposts and the likes. But then Google discontinued that.
Then I used Google+ for Testing, but nowadays i only visit if somebody mentions me or i get noticed on any other way. For everything else, my account(s – one via google.com and 1-2 via google apps for your domain… not beeing able to combine such things just plainly sucks) there are pretty much dead. It’s just too much of a hassle and gives not much of gain.

Github (DrAzraelTod) – well i just created an account there some weeks ago (i know: “WHAT?”) and maybe i am using it more often in the future.. we’ll see

I’m so stalkable online that it’s a shame. Google my name and you find out just about everything. Thankfully, I don’t really have any dark secrets.

My first domain (since you asked) was swingmonkey.com back in 2000/2001, and then I wrote my own blog software in 2004, which has been continually modified into frankencode, and still runs. I wrote a post last summer about the way that the evolution of social networks was making my blog mostly obsolete, and yet I continue to blog for some reason. Maybe it’s just habit.

By the way, don’t heckle me for using IE7. I’m at work and they block everything. Even Chrome portable on a usb stick. Even when I spoof the user-agent. Second thought, you can heckle. I sure do.

Github is importantly noted. If you code, it’s an awesome medium of choice.

Heh, with a last name like “Wood” (it’s no Smith, but it isn’t rare by a long shot), I think I would have had to register my last name as a domain around ’96…. Hell, immediate family members have met two people with the same first & last name as myself just within 100 miles of where I was born. (This also makes searching for me on the internet rather difficult, unless you know a few key facts to help narrow it down… which overall I find to be a good thing.)

Ghost here ;)

I have a Twitter account, but with its two(!) messages, it doesn’t give people much of a image of myself. Then I have a profile page of MyOpenId (hosted on my own domain thanks to some CNAME magic) which only has my name and email.

I had a blog, but frankly I never had anything to post there, so it just lingered until the hosting account got canceled.

The only important account I have with my real name is StackOverflow/Exchange, because they represent some actual knowledge and I won’t post personal opinions or information there. They have more of what I’d like a stranger to read about me than any other account.