Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

And I agree. Sort of.

What the article identified is a shift towards seeing the web as offering myriad ways to communicate and participate.

I enjoy reading blogs and I like having the opportunity to comment. But for most of the blogs that I read, their authors also have a Twitter stream, their photos are on Flickr, they stream video to Qik (amongst other things). And this content is becoming more valuable to me than the stuff on their blogs. It’s valuable because it’s instant and it allows me to participate in a conversation much more easily.

Platforms

I was wondering the other day why it is I don’t religiously scan my Google Reader subscriptions every lunchtime anymore (see?). And I’ve come to realise it’s partly because I’m already getting updates and ideas and comments from the bloggers I’m subscribed to from their other web activity.

This is not to say that blogging is dead but we’re in an age of platforms now. Where we are no longer identified by our blog but by the sum of our web activity. It’s what FriendFeed attempts to facilitate – although it’s worth noting that the way FriendFeed is designed can make an entire feed of one person’s web activity appear overwhelming.

For me, I feel a redesign of this blog coming on to truly reflect my web activities on the platforms I currently describe as ‘Social habits’.

*Actually I believe @philcampbell mentioned it first and I agreed.

I tried it out once on Twitter but it didn’t really work. Plurk’s self-contained conversations are much more suited to it though.

Knowing that there was a small team of folk online and ready to go I began with:

Once upon a time on a dark night, something stirred in a Birmingham side street… what happens next plurkers?

It was greeted enthusiastically and a handful of people began contributing to the narrative.

You can read the story here.

The story was location-based so I thought it could be fun to plot the locations on a Google map. Someone on Twitter suggested the Birmingham side street could be ‘Needless Alley’ which is a real place in Brum. Perfect!

In creating the map I was inspired to add satellite co-ordinates into the narrative as a plot device so these were discovered engraved on the back of the protagonists watch in chapter one.

Quite how the map element evolves, and whether other web elements are invoked remains to be seen but I like the notion of layering the narrative in this way.

Because he’s a master of such things, @philcampbell suggested creating a podcast out of the story but I’m not best qualified to take this on.

What I do think could be fun though would be doing a live reading, with two or three voices and possibly someone ‘operating’ the google map etc. But we need to see how the story evolves first. What particularly excites me about this is that the story might be being ‘performed’ as it is being written by the audience.

We’ll have to see about that. For now though, come to Plurk and help write Jonny Snake’s destiny.

It’s occasionally almost like having JockeySlut back – almost being the operative word.

The electronics shops factor is a good sign – the last song we remember hearing this frequently while in Currys Digital was Shanks & Bigfoot’s ‘Sweet Like Chocolate’ – and that was a massive hit, so ‘Dance Wiv Me’ could be Dizzee’s biggest hit since ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’. Although Currys Digital was called Dixons in those days, so the goalposts have shifted slightly.

From The greatest duet since ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’