The Flow of Consciousness

I enjoy making connections with friends, family, acquaintances, and professionals in just about any field. I use certain social networks for certain purposes and have certain policies for establishing connections on those networks.

Here’s the golden rule: If you don’t like something I’ve posted, contact me privately about it. If I continue to post things you don’t like, UNFOLLOW or UNFRIEND or otherwise DISCONNECT from me.

Microblogs

I use it for general musings, plus stock, politics and technology related stuff. Feel free to follow me, but it’s unlikely that I’ll follow back unless you’ve contributed to my knowledge somehow or I’ve found more than one or two of your posts amusing/informational.

Twitter

I twitter from @colindean. I crosspost most things sent to Twitter to Identi.ca, too. I follow a lot of people, so if you’re really trying to get a hold of me, DM or @reply to me and I’ll likely see it.

Identi.ca

I post from @colindean. I crosspost most things from Twitter, but occasionally use it for !ubuntu related things and other tech help. I really prefer Identi.ca.

Social networking sites

Please contact me only if you’ve met me or we’ve had some kind of extended, electronic-only contact.

LinkedIn

I use LinkedIn for professional contacts for computer science, education, and journalism related things. As per standard LinkedIn policy, please connect with me only if you know me in person or we’ve worked at the same company. I keep LinkedIn very business-only.

Facebook

I use Facebook to keep in contact with friends from high school, college, and life in general. Feel free to request me on Facebook if you’ve met me in person, professional and personal contacts. I’ll do the same. I tend to post political things and technology queries.

MySpace

MySpace is virtually dead to me, but I do occasionally drop by to post a bulletin or read the blog of a few friends who use it. I use it like Facebook, but primarily for high school and college contacts.

MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog doesn’t seem to be as popular as it once was when I first signed up, but I get new adds and add people do it every now and then. Please note that many of my followers on MyBlogLog are spammers, and not representative of my audience.

Technorati

I generally neglect Technorati.

Last.fm

I listen to a lot of music, and Last.fm helps me keep track of my habits and recommend new bands. I frequently listen to the shoegazing radio station.

Social Bookmarking/News sites

I don’t use these terribly often, but I do check them every now and then.

Digg

Digg was once useful, but now it’s a lot of noise and easily gamed.

Slashdot

Newsvine

Reddit

I find Reddit to be very useful and its traffic more organic than Digg or Slashdot’s massive bursts.

StumbleUpon

I used to use StumbleUpon daily, now it’s a rarely used, but very useful tool.

Media sites

I very often share what I’m seeing or doing with folks. Policy for these sites is the same as for microblogs. I’ll generally follow back if I’m already following on a connected microblog.

Twitpic

I post pictures on Twitpic and they go into my Twitter stream.

12seconds

12seconds takes the microblogging idea and makes it into 12 second videos. My posts on there are very random and often wacky.

YouTube

YouTube is where I post shorter videos and clips.

Revver

Revver is where I post longer videos, but I don’t use it much anymore since the revenue sharing rates went down.

Flickr

Flickr just gets crossposts from Twitpic, but I do occasionally upload better pictures I’ve taken.

Picasa

Picasa is neglected these days, but used to be my general dumping ground for pictures.

Zooomr

Zooomr just gets crossposts from Twitpic via Pixelpipe. I liked Zooomr back when it first opened because it had OpenId login, but the name is difficult to express to people, and they just end up spelling it wrong, getting frustrated, and not looking at my pictures.

Software sites

These are software related sites I use frequently.

Launchpad

Launchpad is an open source code hosting site proffered by Canonical, the same company which sponsors Ubuntu development. It’s built around my preferred DVCS, Bazaar.

Ohloh

Ohloh is an open source project progress tracker and development journaling network. I use it more as a microblog these days.

iusethis

iusethis is a neat program usage tracking tool for Mac OS X. There’s also a iusethis windows version.

GitHub

GitHub is a project hosting site for open and closed source projects. It’s among the most popular code hosting sites on the web, especially for OSX users and web developers. It’s built around the DVCS git.

Gitorious

Gitorious is a code hosting site for open source projects. It, too, is built around the DVCS git.

BitBucket

BitBucket is a project hosting site for open and closed source projects. It is built around the DVCS Mercurial.

Google Code

Google Code is a project hosting site for open source projects. One can choose between Subversion VCS or Mercurial DVCS for it.