Left to right: Scarlett Luv, Wendz Tempest, Anarya Elderslie, Aarya Phantomhive, Vaneeesa Blaylock, Paypaback Writer, Zet Avril, Ravensong Merlin, Peep Sideshow Darkward, Kara Trapdoor, & Daallee
And so, Avatar Blogger Crossfit month has come to an end. I tossed my name into the pool because I knew it would give me the incentive to work on this blog more, rather than allowing it to fall into neglect as occasionally happens. I’m happy with how things have turned out, I didn’t do tooo bad, I managed to make posts for most of the days of the month, although towards the end I had RL interfere with getting in world and doing things, and I fell off the regular posting wagon.
My goal for July: to keep up with posts! Not daily, perhaps, but certainly at least a couple times a week. I’ve noticed this month that my renewed interest in SL has caused me to shift focus away from my other primary blogging outlet, where my interest was already starting to wane a little. While that will keep me more likely to look for good content to put here, it might tempt me to toss random vaguely RL interest things into the mix at times. This is still somewhat of a topic-free zone, where I’m mostly wanting to show off my SL photos or ramble about something and it may have haphazard appeal to others, but I’m having fun 😀
Other goals for the second half of 2013 related to SL and indirectly sparked by participating in blogging challenges: Make use of the facebook page I made for my avi. It was initially created as an experiment to see how pages work so I could advise my husband, but since it’s there I should be doing something with it 🙂 And Plurk… darn it. I keep looking at Plurk, I keep trying to figure out how to get in the swing of things, I am always reading about how the SL community on Plurk is extremely interactive and that’s where all the news is to be found, but outside of a couple bloggers and a few content creators I have no idea who the “must follow” plurk accounts are. And I’m not sure of the etiquette there, do you follow other people as a fan and wait for them to follow you back as a fan, which makes you ‘friends’ or do you request to be a friend right at the start? Suggestions and advice are appreciated!
I hope everyone else has had fun with blogger month! I’m really glad I decided to jump in and participate, even if I didn’t keep on schedule. But I don’t consider my lack of a daily post a failure, I still managed to get myself moving, get back to posting some nice shots up on Flickr, meet some of the other bloggers, and discover some really good blogs that I hadn’t seen before. I’d say this was a win all around! \(^_^)/
You can check out the full Avatar Blogger Crossfit participant list at iRez.me
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Yay Raven! It was so wonderful having you be a part of this grand adventure. Funny you mention your blog occasionally falling into neglect… I think that’s probably the natural order of things… especially anything where you don’t have to punch a time clock every morning.
In April 2013 iRez only had 6 posts… and in July 2012 there were 110! Talk about inconsistent! If it’s doable consistency does seem to be an important element to building a blog. IDK about your “other” blog – is it too different? or different identity? Sometimes things should be separate, but whenever possible I like to combine things so that you can have more energy in one place instead of bits of energy scattered here and there. 2 posts / week on Blog A + 1 post / week on Blog B, could = 3 posts, or every other day on Super Blog C! 🙂
Yes on Plurk. I used it a long time ago and never really got rolling with it. I thought then that Twitter was much stronger and more useful. Which I still think is true… except… I wasn’t aware, as you’ve mentioned, that SL is apparently HUGE on Plurk. IDK if I’ll go back or not… haha SO many things to do.
Doing more with FB can’t be a bad idea. It’s the biggest town square the world has ever known. I also kind of hate FB. For me it’s the place where even smart people can be superficial and banal. I guess my feeling on FB is that you have to have a presence and show a few links there, but I’d like to keep my own time there to a minimum.
It’s hard to recommend G+ over FB since FB is SO much bigger and SO much more active. But what I’ve come to realize is that while Google certainly isn’t perfect, their interests are way more in line with mine than FB. For me FB is the New AOL. It’s a (soft) Walled Garden, and they’d love to keep you there forever (also the New Television in that sense)
As a blogger, or “content creator” if you will, Google really wants to connect people to my work! Sure they want to be the “on-ramp,” but they’re really good at that, and they want to deliver eyeballs to me. FB would love to be the whole Interstate Highway system unto itself. Anyway, that’s a rambling way of saying you might also want to think about Google+ Communities.
Thanks again for being part of the ABC adventure Raven. I’d really love to hang out in-world sometime soon. Let’s look each other up please.
xoxo, Van.
I loved doing the 30 days!! And what is it they say, if you do something often enough it will become a habit? I have a short attention span and usually get distracted by something shiny before I develop a new habit. Hopefully I’ve broken that cycle here 😀
I agree I like Twitter better than Plurk, in part because I stare at the scrolling interface of Plurk and it just looks weird :-\ although I do like the ability to comment directly on a plurk rather than try to converse on Twitter in a string of @’s.
I’ve not yet made friends with Google+, I have it for my RL, but I just never use it. I love Google for my gmail, and all their various apps, but G+ doesn’t grab me and I think it’s primarily because no one I know uses it. Which is a shame, because it does seem promising. Since my Google presence is entirely my RL name I’m not sure how to toss Ravensong into the mix, and I’m reluctant to create a G+ under an avatar name because I have a friend who recently had her G+ avatar account deactivated because she couldn’t provide RL documents showing that her name on the profile was her legal RL name.
Still contemplating if it is even possible to blend my blogs in some fashion… but probably not, and it is not so much a question of identity (it’s all me regardless of the log-in name) it’s more a question of formats and topics. My other main blog of the moment is a fairly traditional Tumblr. I occasionally make rambly text posts, but primarily I share/reblog pics of things I fangirl over, or images I see that I like, so I suspect it’s mostly incompatible with this type of blog. And yet I’m still trying to figure out how to allow them to converge because I kinda like to streamline things. However, I do realize they represent different interests and sometimes it’s best for readers to keep them divided. The solution is probably to take my tendency towards occasional long rambles and apply them here, even if they might touch more on RL I can always include an SL image that might relate to my topic, and leave the fangirl flailing to Tumblr, since it is much more suited to that and it’s what most of the people who followed me there expect to see. Though maybe readers here wouldn’t mind YouTube clips with my mood music of the day at the end of my posts, which might satisfy this inner need I have to say “Hey this music I like, listen to it!” 😀
I should have probably made this a blog post haha!
Tl;dr – Thank you for organizing the ABC challenge, and I’m so glad to have met you! We’ll certainly have to look each other up in world! 😀 And now I have to go off and take a picture of my big head, lol! ;D
One reason I like having your own website, like a wordpress blog, is that you have *more* control over it. You never have *total* control over anything, but then that’s true IRL too of course. But on FB, G+, etc etc, you’re really “building your house on somebody else’s property:
http://youtu.be/rfWB90X1sWY
As for G+, if you want *that identity* to have it’s own “content stream”… as you say… not necessarily because you want them to be separate “people” but because you have separate “topics”… if you think about it… Social Networks view identities as “Marketing Units” and so they have a set of constraints & affordances that don’t necessarily map to our interests… from the user perspective you could think of Identity as a file cabinet… you could throw the pages of your novel in a giant pile on the floor, mixed in with your tax returns and your high school love letters… but it makes sense to take a few minutes to put them in different drawers in your file cabinet…
Which is to say… if you want a different G+ drawer for some content… I’d just make it… I can’t guarantee you’ll never be deleted by Google, but here’s what I *think* will happen… if you make YOUR File Cabinet Drawer to fit within the constraints of THEIR Marketing Units… Google will leave you alone and you’ll never hear another word about it.
In my case, I was banned by Google, went through the entire appeals process, submitted my documents and my case (which *I* thought was compelling) and my appeal was denied by Google — all for the name “Vaneeesa Blaylock”
A few weeks later I tried to open a G+ account for the name “Vanessa Blaylock” and G+ said WELCOME! Let’s connect up your friends and maybe you’d like to follow some celebrities and can we help you make a page or start a community??? 🙂
They have countless millions of users and sometimes WE think THEY are really looking at US… but usually they don’t have the time to care about us… it’s just an algorithm that says “repeating vowels sound fake – bounce no matter what” OR “Vanessa” is a name, seat her in the front row”
Facebook & G+ seem to use similar algorithms on this. IDK if G+ will like “Ravensong” or not, sounds ok to me… but it’ll only take you about 1 minute to find out… and if you’re in… *probably* you’re in for good.
The conversation on G+ is not more robust than FB, it’s less. I love FB’s reach. I don’t love FB’s banality. Meanwhile G+ “wants” to drive traffic to our websites – that’s worth a little sucking up! 🙂