Private pain

This morning, I received some sad news about a death of a man I knew just about my whole life, but from whom I’d grown distant over the last few years. No need to go into any detail publicly, except to say that I find the situation exceptionally complicated and tragic.

My first instinct, honed over the last 10 or 12 years, is to reach out via my online life. I want to express how I feel. I want to encourage others to make good decisions and always do ‘just so’. I want people to love each other and look out for each other’s interests rather than their own.

But then I remembered a piece I read a couple of years ago in the New York Times. Maureen Dowd interviewed the founders of Twitter, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. One bit stuck with me:

ME: I heard about a woman who tweeted her father’s funeral. Whatever happened to private pain?

EVAN: I have private pain every day.

I suppose we all do. Sometimes we keep it private out of shame. Other times we can’t handle the pressure. Still other times, like in this case, we do it out of respect for other people’s privacy.

Either way, I just need to watch out for the oversharing. But this is okay, it seems to me, because it’s a little more ‘meta’: it’s about the need to refrain from putting too much out there even when we want contact.

I’m going to go give someone a hug now.

Focusing to recover my identity

I started fiddling around again today with my digital life. Or, perhaps more tellingly given that we’ve made it to 2011, my web life. What blogs do I want to keep around (or start)? What about Twitter and Tumblr? How about other communities where I’d like to participate more, like Wikipedia?

This inevitably leads to two separate yet linked trains of thoughts: tools and topics. In the past, perhaps I focused too much on the cup and not enough on the coffee. So today I thought more about the topics. What areas deserve my attention? What stuff matters? Out of necessity, my professional life will probably remain fairly static this year, or at least I hope it does, since I’m doing well in my current gig.

Focus matters

And this led to a bit of epiphany for me: focusing on something makes it seem to matter more.

I suppose, like most interesting thoughts, that I’ve heard something like it before.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:21, NWT)

Of course, this applies even to things that actually don’t matter. Not everything in our lives will ever have the same importance. Our lives already give us a heavy enough load to carry, and we need to find ways to lighten it from time to time.

But as an example: if I blog about, say, MMORPGs (a pastime I really enjoy), then I’ll inevitably spend more time, energy, and focus on them. But those resources have limits, so maybe I should take the focus I would otherwise spend blogging about them and invest it in something else, while still leaving me the option to play some.

On the other hand, for now I can’t spend as much focus as I’d like on the deeper things, for various reasons. That statement is fairly circumspect, out of necessity, but I think I can say that for the last couple of years I’ve been in a survival mode in some sense.  But if I spend more of my focus on spiritual and emotional matters, then I can clarify my mind and thereby re-energize myself.

The lamp of the body is the eye. If, then, your eye is simple, your whole body will be bright. (Matthew 6:22, NWT)

I’ll never be the pre-2009 Kyle Maxwell again, for better or for worse. But I can focus on what he had that I can still have.

Lifestreaming

The details of my life are quite inconsequential…

Okay, so I’m no Dr. Evil, but I do have this odd desire to share what’s happening in my life and what’s bouncing around in my head with people. Sometimes the ruminations have a focus, other times they just reflect current personal events and whatnot.

Even though I don’t update this blog very often, my Twitter feed does get a lot of activity. So when I do write something here, usually I prefer to make it something more than a quick blurb. And the folks that want to see what’s happening want more than just that; photos, videos, etc. all figure into the mess. In short, I want a lifestream (or the equivalent of my Facebook updates).

A few months ago, I thought FriendFeed might provide the answer, but now I’ve found a service I think I like better: Storytlr. The presentation looks a lot nicer and they have some advanced options like using a CNAME record (so your site looks like it really is your site) as well as backing up your data from other services.

For those interested, I still use Feedburner, so you can still just get the same URL no matter what. Then again, you might get inundated with my Twitter updates…

Via Anabubula

Initial thoughts on Twitter

So I’ve started using Twitter a bit more recently. It’s had a few uses thus far: keeping in touch with family members, particularly those that live far away. I’m starting to have a few more “geek” conversations as well. In terms of immediacy or maybe synchronicity, it lives somewhere between email and IM. It’s sort of like SMS for the web (although it can work just fine with SMS as well).

ReadWriteWeb had an article about using Twitter for self-promotion. The only things I really thought were useful out of it were the ideas to synchronize your avatars and maybe have all your various social network profiles include links to one another. Frankly, I can’t stand it when folks seed a thousand places with links to their most recent post. Maybe it does drive traffic, I don’t know. But if what you have to say really is interesting, people will pick up on it, comment on it, and over time your reputation will grow.

There have been some recent availability issues, evidently due to scaling as well as spam. A lot of Web 2.0 sites seem to really struggle with this, and I’m not sure if it’s because of poor architecture at the beginning, the fact that this area is still fairly cutting-edge, or just that traffic increases so much faster than their ability to add back-end resources.

They do seem to have some level of data filtering, as at least backslashes have some trouble. But I haven’t spent any time yet understanding the parameters there or what work has been done in this area. It just seems to me that this is a pretty useful attack vector given how many different ways there are to send out tweets to so many different people.