georgestarcher.randomlings

In my last post I covered how I share my geo location information. Unfortunately it seems I wrote too soon.

Recently Brightkite upgraded to v2.0. A downgrade would be a better way to put it. Fireeagle and Brightkite no longer cross update. Then then claim to have simplified the privacy control. Yet it is nearly impossible to figure out how to set default location sharing levels by group now. Top it off public side sees no location at all anymore unless you make your exact location open to all.

I would avoid Brightkite completely until they get their act together. They should take a lesson from the old addage. If it is not broken do not fix it.

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Sent from my iPhone
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Continuing in the theme of where is your audience.. for knowing where you are the concern is whom you allow to know what level of resolution.

Now I don't always consistently update my location. Just randomly when the mood hits me. Or when I want to publish it. Sometimes I am other places and leave it on a certain location on purpose. Here is how I handle my geo location information. I start with my iPhone 3GS that has full GPS. On the iPhone I normally use the http://www.brightkite.com/ application because it makes updating my location stream one touch. Next if I have friends that I want to see my exact real location I can give them permissions from Brightkite as long as they have a Brightkite account.

The world at large I would rather just see city general location information. This shows up on my http://www.georgestarcher.com blog and in my twitter location field on my twitter profile. So I let Brightkite and Fireeagle cross control each other. Then I use the superb privacy per application link controls from http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ to send only city level information to EagleTweet for twitter updating and my blog via a widget. One of the best things about Fireeagle is it requires you to regularly keep your account active for sharing. Think of it as a deadman's switch. If I fail to renew my authorization it stops all sharing to all apps tied to it. I have my renewal set to require it monthly.

Below is a diagram of the information path.

Where is your "audience"? Or perhaps you have several levels of audience. I do. This is something I realized this week. I effectively have two main audience connection points for what I have to say and share. I have some minor levels of audience on my blogs and sites like Flickr directly.

The big two for me are twitter and Facebook. I should state that though I have audience on Facebook I barely log into that site directly. I feed it with twitter mainly and some other sources.

Twitter. My main audience directly on twitter is mainly my fellow security and some podcasting folks. These are people I want near immediate sharing back and forth. Sometimes it even reaches conversational levels. Twitter is a primary input point for me. A partial output point for a certain class of friend and colleague. These folks probably don't care about all my photos and non tech/mac/security information.

Facebook. My secondary audience is here. These are folks I have known for a long time, a few media types. But mostly for school and lifetime friends to find me and keep up on my doings. I personally don't care for Facebook games etc. So I rarely log in directly. But I want to keep these friends in the regular loop. So I send content from Twitter to my status updates. I also feed Facebook updates with other sites like Twitter, my tech blog and this blog. So they can get a stream of things from me without my having to be a real Facebook user.

Next are my two blogs. One tech/forensics heavy is a traditional wordpress blog. Mostly the audience for my tech blog are folks who find specific content I post via google. The rest catch the posts via friendfeed or facebook. A few security and forensics types might also directly subscribe via rss. Except for google I figure the direct access is a small portion of those seeing the posts.

The personal blog is a more unique animal. I have redirected my georgestarcher.net domain to a site called Posterous.com. This is meant to be an easy blogging system. BUT more importantly its a feeder mechanism. You can setup auto posting to other social sites. Anything I post here can be made to send updates to Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed (that is another aggregation site). Also you can have it send photos straight to Flickr and videos to youTube. There are many other services it supports. I don't use it to send posts back to twitter since that audience for me is different and would like tune me out if I did that. I also don't have it auto post to flickr since like my tech blog I want only my best photos there. I leave my casual photos on the posterous blog itself so my casual audience can see them down stream.

The end of the story is I want to enter as few places as possible while feeding the right type of content to my appropriate personal audience. Twitter is my main point of entry. That comes out for everyone but I keep the comments flavored a certain way. Then I use my two blogs to segregate the types of longer format posts.  I provided a map to show the flow of the social posting shell game.

I have been learning a lot as I manage and tie together the various social media sites. There is a site you should start with. It is http://en.gravatar.com/

This site let's you associate various avatar icons to various email addresses you use. This can be any image you like to use for your photo on social sites.

Make yourself a login. Add any email addresses you use for sites like Disqus, wordpress etc. You may not even realize all the sites that accept gravatar managed icons. Then when you have an account at supporting sites with the same email addresses your profile pic will come from gravatar. This makes it much easier to make Changes to your profile pic across sites later.