How I Manage My Social Media

The Internet is awesome, no doubt, but it can be a challenge to keep track of all the information that’s flapping about these days. I’ve tried various techniques and technologies to help me manage the various streams of information that I like to keep an eye on. I thought I’d share how I go about it.

Google Reader

I keep an eye on a lot of blogs, mostly design/science/art focussed. Typically I’ve got about 100 feeds in my feed reader, but I’ve had a bit of a purge recently, and chopped it down to about 30. I use Google Reader to keep track of them all, sorted in to various tagged groups (Graphics, Science, Paper Craft, Comics etc..).

I tend to read through one group at a time, toggling the Expanded or List views depending on which group I’m reading. Expanded view is best for the graphics feeds making it easy to quickly scan through the images, picking out interesting pics. I prefer List view for text articles where I tend just to scan the headlines.

Tumblr

For a while I used to keep a photo album as a scrapbook of various images from magazines and what-not. As I tend to browse more articles online than off these days the photo album has become a bit redundant. For a while I kept printing off images and sticking them in, but this process was too cumbersome to keep up with.

Now I use Tumblr as my scrapbook, combined with a Firefox plugin and an Android app, I can quickly and easily add inspiring images to my collection.

In Firefox I use the Tumblr Post plugin. With this I simply right click an image and select ‘Post photo to my Tumblelog’. I copy and paste the page link (for reference) in to the comment field and hit upload.  Update: There’s actually a plugin setting that sets the image link to the page URL, no copy and paste needed! Easy as.

On my mobile phone (HTC Hero running Android) I have the Asuka Tumblr app, which allows me to send any image on my phone straight up to Tumblr. I can use this to take photos of things I see and stick them straight in to my scrapbook.

Twitter

I love Twitter. It’s awesome. However, managing followees and keeping an eye on conversations takes a bit of work. Lists and Saved Searches are the answer. I’ve got a number of lists grouping the different people I follow, and I take a gander at each on a semi-regular basis.

I’ve also set a few custom searches for words and phrases I’m interested in. Twitter search accepts logical search constructs, so I can search for "paper engineer" AND "paper engineering" in one go. This is a good way to find other people talking about things I like to talk about.

Incidentally, I’ve tried, but not really got on with any of these social network aggregation programs, I’m much happier with the good old Twitter site itself.

Follow me on Twitter
Check out my Tumblr Scrapbook