Hi, I'm back. I feel like I fell off a cliff there for a while. I hate that. I get going in a particular direction and it's all good, but then I drive into a rotary and can't decide which exit to take.
So while mentally traveling around in small circles for the last week or so, I've been puttering around on various social media outlets trying to set up connections for Artifactual. It's been slow going. I tried to create a page for it on Facebook, but when I try to link the blog to it, it only wants to post to my personal page. As I struggle to keep the last vestiges of my semi-anonymous blogging life away from my family, I do NOT want them to make that connection. I still can't get it to work. The only option I can see is setting up a separate account for Artifactual, but apparently Facebook frowns on that sort of thing. I think I may have to share posts to Artifactual's FB page by hand. I also cannot figure out how to get a FB badge from the Artifactual FB page to put on the actual blog. I can get one from my personal page, but that defeats the purpose. What a pain!
Google Plus. Okay. I'm on it. Now what? I have "Circled" my SIL and one of my husband's cousins, both of whom have reciprocated. I've also added a handful of bloggers who don't know me well and have no idea I've linked to them. And while I love the idea of the hangout feature, I don't yet know enough people on Google Plus to have one. The functionality is fabulous enough that while the rest of Google Plus will probably never catch up to Facebook and Twitter and will eventually wither away, the hangout will thrive, as it is both useful and fun.
Muppet break! Frustrations notwithstanding, this ad makes me smile every time:
And while I have never been a huge fan of either Queen or David Bowie, I have loved this song since the first time I heard it back in High School. It never gets old.
Moving on...
So maybe you've heard of the next big thing - Pinterest? I've been avoiding it because what I saw of it early on looked like an endless Anthropologie catalog. Just what I don't need when I'm not working. But hearing about how fast it grew and its usefulness as a content sharing site, I thought it might be useful for Artifactual once it gets off the ground and decided to get lost in try it.
As kids my sister and I used to sit around leafing through my mother's stacks of ridiculously priced catalogs and claiming numerous items for our future houses and closets with no concept of how to actually pay for them. Pinterest is exactly that impulse with some organization and quirky captioning. It is a lovely time suck. As someone who does not do a whole lot of shopping (though my husband might beg to differ), I just had no idea there were so many things in the world. Of course there are annoyances, like the repetition of images that multiple people have repinned, and the overwhelming desire to delete things you don't want to look at (not possible). The whole thing reminds me of the stuff we used to cut out of magazines and tape to our dorm walls in college; beautiful clothes, beautiful people, pithy sayings, and an overabundance of food. There are some truly stunning things to see at but in less than three days I was sick of the mustache as a design element. Stop, please.
As of this writing, I still haven't accumulated any followers. I'm Lisse13 on Pinterest. By the way if you haven't yet seen Pinterest, You Are Drunk, you should.
On Saturday, I did something really crazy and drove across the state to attend a PodCamp. They have a version of this in Boston, but I just missed it. I got up earlier than I have for weeks and drove over two hours to Holyoke Community College. I wasn't sure whether I belonged there, but it was a very mixed group of professionals - marketers, audio engineers, videographers, photographers, and people who ran small businesses in need of better understanding the tools. I figured I was there to mostly learn, but I was surprised by how much I talked. As SoMe enthusiasts go, I'm still pretty much an amateur, but that even made it clear that there are many others who are interested in these tools with even less knowledge and more floundering. I came away from that event thinking of the many small businesses on the North Shore that could use an event like this...
Wheels aturnin'. Stay tuned.
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