An ontology of microblogging

I’ve added a new top-level page to this site. It’s called ~~~ and can be found at joodaloop.com/~ or in the nav bar. The name is a big quirky, I admit, but format is simple:

One Big Markdown File where new entries are appended to the top.

The hope is that I practice writing things down more often, in a place where it doesn’t feel like I’m “notifying” people, or writing to an audience at all. There is no effortless way to link to entries, there is no RSS feed, and there is no organisation other than the chronological. It as an attempt to move things that look like personal notes into a public-facing page. Inspired, in no small part, by Nadia’s (recently taken down!) Notes pages.

While designing this new publishing location, I was forced into thinking about all the existing formats on my website; now grown from 2 items to 3…

• Evergreen writing (lists, notebooks, or essays) that require real investment into polish and maintenance.
• Riffs, which are temporal publications, used primarily to wonder aloud in brief or send out announcements.
• ~~~, which I almost named “Stream”, “Flow”, and “Flux”, but ultimately decided I had enough named sections on my website. Used for thoughtdumps.

One might well ask “why aren’t you using Streams for this?”, seeing as I made and maintain a service for microblogging. As all good questions, it leads to a fruitful line of enquiry — culminating in the taxonomy below, which I think covers all the things one can achieve with a microblog.

1. Quick capture
2. Glib phrases & jokes
3. Journalling
4. Commentary
5. Shower thoughts
6. Thread-length extempore posts
7. Personal/project updates
8. Conversation
9. Signal boosting/curation/recommendations
10. In-group signalling

I will continue to use Streams for #1 (which makes sense, given that’s what it was built for), but I don’t think the other uses are suited to it. For example, I prefer to write Riffs in a proper text editor and over a period of many minutes. Not as a hurried message into a Telegram channel. Conversation, jokes, updates and recommendations are similarly all best done in places that have the capability for interaction.

The medium and the message and me have yet to exhaust all possible combinations of formats and workflows — with ~~~ as the latest addition to the set. My guess is that it’s primary roles will be journal, commentary, and thought-posting, which are currently underserved by existing outlets (believe it or not, I try to restrict my commentary on Twitter out of respect to my followers).

And I think it’s particular combination of features (self-ownership, low effort bar, personal/limited audience) is sufficiently novel that you should try adding one to your site!