I took some time to look at my blog and it saddens me to say that I my post count has never been so low, both in quantity and quality.

I still rant and have my own opinions (DUH!) but the need to share my different views with the world (the five persons who visit my blog) has changed. Don’t ask my why, maybe it’s laziness, procrastination or just the “plague” of Twitter and Facebook micro blogging… this or perhaps the excess of information available on the Internet.

Face it. It has never been so easy to get information on whatever topic you want, specially if you’re into technology and video games. There are millions of sites and blogs replicating every bit of news and info that comes up, it’s like an infinite echo of information. What value do we, as bloggers,  add to the flow of information? Our personal opinions? Rants? Sometimes we might even mislead our readers when our posts have little or no quality…

I guess the true reason I stoped blogging is because I “looked around” and found out that I’m not actually creating, I’m not adding value, I’m copying what’s being copied millions of times per second. I’m an echo…

Yup… I need a wake up call. We all do.

Much has been said since Facebook allowed the new “vanity URL’s” (or user url’s like I rather call it, since vanity urls is purely an american expression adopted from the vanity plates they have in their cars).

Most of the posts about this are from users bitching about the way Facebook roll out this feature, allowing the users to choose any alias to be used in http://www.facebook.com/whateveryouchoose regardless of their username, unlike Twitter that has http://www.twitter.com/username. Others rant about the fact that Facebook should have provided something like http://user.facebook.com, forgeting that Facebook has milions of users and something like that would have a termendous weight in their DNSs…

But, as always, there’s something good to learn. One of the posts I read about this subject (no link, sorry, can’t find it) mentioned a cool way to give your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, [insert your favorite social network here] URL’s to other people, that is, if you have your own domain.

In my case, my domain is odrakir.com, so I created some subdomains redirecting to the social networks I use the most:

• http://facebook.odrakir.com
• http://twitter.odrakir.com
• http://flickr.odrakir.com
• http://linkedin.odrakir.com
• http://delicious.odrakir.com

This way, I can give an url that’s easy to memorize and always mentions my “brand name”, cool enough to use on a visit card

It took me a week to kill the flu and return to a decent state, lowering the fever from almost 40º to a regular body temperature. Excused to say that I didn’t follow Codebits the remaning days, nor did my usual blogging / twittering / feed reading. I barely had any interaction with the web (actually even with my computer) and this made me slow down and reduce the amount of time I dedicated to the social web.

I noticed that Twitter was consuming most of my online time, diverting my attention from other information that actually mattered, so I decided to make a “Twitter diet”. I first began to use Twitter to get updates on people and topics I was interested, but Twitter mutated drastically into IRC 2.0, not only you feed it a lot of info that is unnecessary, you also get back the same amount crap or more. I noticed that if some info worth of notice hit Twitter, it was also mentioned on blogs a few minutes later. The only difference was getting the info now or later.

All this allied to my heavy work load made me change the way I get info from the web.

Sure I miss Twittering with the usual crowed, getting the “gossip” and always being on top of the action, but it’s too much time and resource consuming… that really had to change. I’m now getting lighter on my work load and having more time to dedicate to my blogs. This “time off” was also useful to plot some plans to make 8-Bit Revolution evolve, you’ll have more info in a few weeks. Right now, I have to check WordPress 2.7 and see if upgrading is going to be bliss or hell

I confess that I’m a little addicted to social networking. I often try new social networks and apps but sometimes I wish that there was only one or only one way to use them all. The ones I use the most are Twitter, Flickr, Jaiku, Digg and the usual gazillion RSS feeds if you can count them as social networking tools.

One of the blogs I follow about Mac applications is UsingMac and in today’s “daily fix” of posts I came across EventBox.

EventBox is like a dream come true for me. It gathers 7 of the most used social networks: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Pownce, Reddit and last but not least RSS aggregation all in one application.

The interface is bliss and pure integration with Leopard. Still in Beta, EventBox features high quality features for each social network service you use, like public and private replying in Twitter, section filtering on Digg, multiple file uploading on Flickr and everything gets to use Growl for notifications.

While very good, there’s still a lot of room for improvement in EventBox. A wide preview pane for RSS to better use widescreen space would be welcome as well as adding more social networks to the list like Jaiku. Adding search, groups and user profile information options in Twitter like Tweetdeck has would be very useful as well. EventBox is not free though, it costs $20 which is not much, specially when you can optimize your usage of social networks, getting rid of 5 or 6 different apps or browser tabs.

Recommended!

Is this the result of today’s massive Twitter exodus?