Blogs

I've been finding it hard to motivate myself to update my blog in recent times, and I suspect there's several reasons for this:  Once you've not posted anything for a while it's hard to know where to start.  Also, I never had a huge number of blogging friends, and the ones I do have don't seem to update much any more either.  I also found it a bit tiresome to post anything of substance on Livejournal.  In an attempt to rejuvenate my enthusiasm, I've decided to try a new system.

I've been hearing a lot about Twitter lately, so I thought I'd give that a go.  I set up an account (here), and I've made a couple of updates.  I even set it up to update my Facebook status.  The trouble is, I just don't "get it".  You can only update in 140 character posts, and you're encouraged to do this regularly.  The frequency that I do things that I'd consider interesting to others is so low that I can't see the point.  Unless people really want to read about me doing things like putting the kettle on, but that brings me to the other reason I don't get it.

When you have your twitter account, you can "follow" other people and they can follow you.  This is pretty much the same as a friend feed on other blogs, but because of the regularity and nature of the updates, it seems a little more like stalking than following to me.  Not only that, but there are very few (if any) people that I'm interested enough in to actually want to follow.

I'm very much looking forward to the new album by St Vincent.  Her last one, Marry Me is one of the best albums I think I've ever heard, and the new one is released in May so I've been checking out her website for news.  I noticed that she has a link to her twitter, and naturally I had a look.  Clearly she expects people to read it, otherwise she wouldn't post the link (I assume), but I felt quite uncomfortable reading what was essentially messages to friends and people who actually know her in real life.

So no, Twitter is not for me.

Vox on the other hand is much more my kind of thing.  It's a lot like Livejournal, but it's linked with things like Photobucket and Amazon, which is a lot more functional and user-friendly.  It's made by the people who owned Livejournal before it was sold to some Russian corporation, so it feels fairly familiar - even down to a lot of the themes being the same, and it enables cross-posting to LJ.  I guess it's a blog with social networking features, rather than something like Myspace, which is a social network with some blogging features.

Anyway; let's see how it goes, eh?