I couldn't put it down.
Linnea Sinclair's Hope's Folly that I discussed in the context of the formula novel in my post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/dissing-formula-novel.html
is truly a page turner that hurtles to a satisfying conclusion of the Romance -- (a beautifully twisted HEA) leaving room for a sequel though in the SF plot. (Sequels are GOOD).
If you are puzzled or dissatisfied by the novels publishing is presenting to you these days, (or buying from you to publish), you have to read Hope's Folly and Linnea's comments on another blog, about the mixed-genre author's real estate problem - how do you treat two separate plots simultaneously in the same space usually alotted to one plot?
Good question; good discussion at
http://magicalmusings.com/?p=3502#comment-63203 (scroll up for Linnea's post).
And Linnea started a really interesting discussion on goodreads.com on how to label the kind of thing we call Alien Romance -- SFR is currently being lumped with PNR (Paranormal Romance).
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/104604.Should_SFR_be_part_of_PNR_
And Linnea just posted a comment on that topic suggesting a solution using goodreads.com
I couldn't figure out goodreads.com well enough to navigate to Linnea's seed post for that discussion that's drawn over 60 comments so far. Maybe she will give us the URL in the comments to this post.
Meanwhile, on this blog, Margaret Carter brought up the recently published research about love and brain chemistry and Rowena Cherry noted the relationship between this brain chemistry research (that has been investigating all kinds of human behavior related to brain function) and Astrology (one of my own favorite topics - see my Astrology For Writers series of posts on this blog).
They've pretty much covered those topics.
So I'd like to point out that browsing among these blogs we all frequent and following authors you find stimulating (via a feed like RSS or friendfeed.com or Atom or technorati.com -- see links at the right of this page) -- will keep your thinking from going stale, and avoid or blast through writer's block.
Writers, inside their stories, are actually discussing a topic of interest to connected communities. It's like a big cocktail party -- writers circulate from group to group (reading other writers' novels) and make a comment now and then (write a novel) to contribute to the general conversation.
Writing is a social activity done in solitude! What a contradiction. No wonder we're stressed.
But with the internet, you can circulate a little each day by using a piece of software that collects pertinent (and impertinent) commentaries from all over the internet and presents them to you in a window on your desktop.
The software is called a feed reader, and there are lots of them available free around the internet. There are also websites like google that provide you a feed reader with your free email account. (if you use gmail, look at the top line of links in your mail page for READER and click - follow the directions and experiment. I quickly out-grew the google reader.).
I don't have a problem with downloading and installing software, but I do research it first. So I asked on LinkedIn and got recommendations.
FeedDemon.com is where I found the recommended download of a very tame and obedient FeedDemon feed reader.
To add a website like http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/ to FeedDemon you just have the FeedDemon software open on your desktop, use your browser to go to the website you want, then click in FeedDemon to add the site to your feeds, and the URL appears in the add slot. Click, add it to a folder provided by feeddemon and presto, you can follow what happens on that page.
I follow several newspapers and other well capitalized websites on subjects I'm interested in, and a number of blogs -- PLUS I follow people by name. It costs something for websites to provide feed, but it's free to the user like you. Blogspot has the feed capability built in, so we who post can be followed.
A Feed Reader is a kind of search software that is of the Web 2.0 world.
It really simplifies your online life.
For example, I wanted to point you to a really nice blog called Galaxy Express which did an article linking to several of our Alien Romance posts on Dialogue.
I just opened my FeedDemon software, clicked the MY CLIPPINGS folder and right there was this URL for you:
http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2009/02/fine-art-of-dialogue.html
It was there because I saved it there, true, but how could I not save such a really nice mention of our work here!
If you leave FeedDemon open while you're online, it will (if you want) auto-update on the latest news you're tracking.
Not every website is capable of being accessed by Feed software -- but I think that is going to change. It's a Web 2.0 invention that really works. It doesn't usually access posts on social networks which try to keep you in a private sphere.
Privacy is what the Web 2.0 philosophy is all about, privacy and user choice.
Oh, which brings me to another item that turned up this last weekend.
Opinion has it that Facebook has turned inimical to the writer's health with a recent re-wording of their terms of use which appears to be a copyright grab.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/17/facebook.terms.service/
They'll probably change that wording again after the furor erupted. Other services that have tried this have had to yield.
But there's another huge topic (at least as big as Astrology and Love-Brain Chemistry) in the entire legal philosophy behind "copyright" -- which is utterly obsolete in this new Web 2.0 world.
The USA has been thriving on our intellectual property law and philosophy, trademarking and copyrighting. If you invent it or make it, it is yours to profit from, and you get to keep most of what you make. (almost most) This gave the USA dominance in the 1800's and 1900's.
We try so hard to honor the property rights on Blogs. What's posted belongs to the poster -- but we also want our words read, or why post at all? So we want small pithy quotes distributed to other blogs with links to the main article -- and OUR NAMES bandied about with links to our homepages.
We want to be part of that cocktail party conversation which is the blogosphere, moving from group to group, participating in the discussion. But we don't want to be invisible. We want to stay attached to our words, no matter who repeats them.
On the third hand, we don't want to be too public.
Web 2.0 domains require that you sign up for an account with the "real" you, but they allow you to upload any photo or sketch or icon for yourself and to invent a screen nickname. People who read what you write and get irrationally furious shouldn't be able to invade and ruin your "real" life.
So we are redefining "privacy," which is an essential element in Romance and even Sex.
At some point on this blog, because we focus on Science Fiction Romance as well as Fantasy Romance and Urban Fantasy -- we really ought to discuss the Art and Science of Futurology.
Linnea Sinclair's HOPE'S FOLLY does a perfect job of reticulating the Romance plot, hits every "beat" of the story, integrates all the images artistically into the Romance. But it falls short on futurology, on where the technological possibilities of today will lead us by interstellar times, and what's coming with that new Intel chip they're now building factories to produce.
Here's another post to base futurology on that could affect how, when, why and who falls in love:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7891132.stm
This item was all over the news this past week about the theoretical breakthrough indicating there could be billions of "Earth Like" planets in this galaxy. SF predicted that, but now we have solid indication that it might be so. We still have the impossibility of traveling to those planets because of the light-speed barrier, but it's only a matter of time until that's dispensed with, too. Look how many impossible things we do today without thinking about it.
Most of us don't read SFR for futurology. In fact, SF may be on the wane as an artform simply because we're already living in "the future" that SF predicted, and it missed big time with predicting the impact of the internet on people.
But SFR is the prefect venue for a new cocktail party topic on how the current and easily projected new technology developments (Medical Records digitized; Designer Cancer Treatment Cocktails unique to your own genes) will impact the way we relate to each other.
In the 1970's some people predicted the Women's Movement would break up families. Men were paid more than women doing the same work so the men could "support a wife and kids" and it was considered imperative that the wife NOT WORK OUTSIDE THE HOME because kids require at least one person's full time attention or they won't grow up to be good people.
Today the last few furbishes are being put on the equal-pay-for-equal-work issues, Hillary put a big frison in the thickest Glass Ceiling, and the VP Candidate among the Republicans has a child who got pregnant out of wedlock and nobody thought that totally disqualified her from running for VP. (OK, the teen did marry the father, but they're just kids -- I saw an interview with the teen mother on TV all played very hard-news-interview style. Today the broken family is a non-issue, even in Romance novels where wives and mothers routinely work outside the home.)
Where is the futurology on the topic of Romance -- futurology that could take into account the online dating services computer programs, Astrology being "outed" as legitimate science, and the impact of the IM, bloggosphere world on Relationships?
Yes, all those have been done in Romance, but have they been done with complete SF style futurology?
Point me at some good books where the SF hits the futurology hard, and the Relationship trope changes on impact.
That was one original (1940's) definition of SF -- "The impact of Science on People, on Society, on Culture."
I know there are thousands of novels in PNR I haven't read -- and thousands of SF novels I've never heard of -- but even Amazon can't point me at exactly what I'm looking for in SFR. That's why this blog is so precious. Look at the writers who contribute!
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Showing posts with label Feed Services. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Feed Services. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
I Love Web 2.0
I just read Linnea Sinclair's note in the comments on her post The Buddy System.
Linnea wrote:
-----------------
If one person has survived it, you can survive it.
One person.
------------------
Rarely have I heard a summation of the basic theme of "our" kind of literature, the binding theme between SF, Paranormal and the general Romance field.
Heroic Fiction belongs to the "Romantic" category -- in the literary sense of "larger than life" -- and that's how most people view stories about those first, or only, "one person"s Linnea is referring to.
This is a point I neglected to make in my blog post here about why we have such a perception problem with Romance.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-we-love-romance.html
And you'll notice that blog post also starts with a comment Linnea Sinclair made!
And that point is that the reason we read these stories, and the reason we prefer characters we can identify with, is that we, ourselves are tasked, perhaps karmically, with being one of those "one persons" who do "it" to demonstrate that it is possible.
We need to break through the barrier around the possible -- mostly because it's a barrier. As people climb mountains because they are there, we hurl ourselves into impossible tasks (such as finding a soul-mate and raising his kids "right") because the task is there.
Yes, SF and Romance are both genres that are about doing the impossible -- finding a Soul Mate or inventing a gadget like the Universal Translator (rumored to have been invented by Spock's human mother, Amanda Grayson) or the Internet or the Web, invented by groups of people desperate to communicate in an "impossible" way.
They did it. Now we do it without even thinking about it.
When I first heard the term e-mail, I had to ask what that meant. The explanation didn't thrill me. It sounded cumbersome and awkward. Today, there's an insurmountable barrier between me and envelopes & stamps!
I remember the wonderful Romantic Comedy, YOU'VE GOT MAIL.
http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=You%27ve+Got+Mail&x=15&y=6
WATCH OUT at that link above for pop-ups and pop-unders circumventing your anti-popup software.
Two people meet via chat online, fall in love, and later discover they already know each other but don't "like" each other all that much in the real world. At the time that movie came out, it was thought "impossible" for real love relationships to begin online.
That movie is a "show don't tell" for a lot of truths about internet socializing that non-netizens deny vigorously.
Text-only communication can reveal the true depths of personality never visible in "live" contact situations. The "sub-text" of Relationship becomes undeniable in text-only. Great movie! Powerful truth. I actually know a couple happily married for more than 10 years who met in an online fandom chat!
And that was chat by text-only! Not even video conferencing. Just text.
I think another such huge chasm as we saw between those just getting online and those who would not or could not attain internet access is opening. It is opening between e-mail and social networking online. Between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.
Social networking got its start as mostly a kiddie thing for wasting time. MySpace and so forth provided the youngest web users a way to communicate with their peers and play online.
There's nothing wrong with playing -- it's what kids have to do to become effective adults. Note Luke Skywalker's jetting around pot-shotting local vermin -- eventually, he used the same skill to take out a Deathstar. How you play and at what affects what you are able to do, and how you can do it as an adult.
So we have a generation-gap chasm opening between those who played their way to adulthood online and those who got online in adulthood. And yes, a chasm between adults who did take the plunge and adults who just have not.
Watching over their kids shoulders, the adults who dabbled online or perhaps used a computer only at work soon saw that this social networking thing is the work-around, the dodge, the cure for SPAM!
If you use, say, LinkedIn.com (professionals only; no kids, no playing) to send a message to a friend, it works just like email except that it lands in their inbox without a ton of e-spam stuck to it.
If you need to tell a few friends something quick, you can twitter or plurk or use one of the other microblog services. I'm sure three more started while I've been typing this.
Texting by simple phone connection is good, too. I worked the election Nov 4th with 7 older people and a 17 year old (Arizona program to allow youngsters to learn to work the Polls).
The 17 year old spent the intervals between voters texting with her hands under the table, looking attentive to her job. The older folks were bemused. One told a story of her college age kid who racked up a couple thousand text messages a month - until he broke up with his girlfriend, and it dropped to hundreds. Texting-romances no doubt abound!
The world is abandoning e-mail and Lists and Newsletters as fast as it can because of the spam load. Life is too short and that stuff is too putrid.
Meanwhile, personal communication has gone multi-media. Sound, images, animation -- it's all at our fingertips. Skype is very popular for international families. And I'm sure it's supporting a lot of romances.
Websites that sell things for a profit are fully interactive, some with a live-chat feature. This personalizing, multi-media, interactive approach to web applications is what they loosely term Web 2.0. Much of it functions as "plug-ins" to a browser.
The lexicon gurus still disagree about the exact definition of Web 2.0 -- but they agree that it takes a broadband connection to get the most benefit out of it.
The internet evolved into the Web which became a personal communication tool swamped by toxic waste, and cleaned up by -- SOCIAL NETWORKING.
Now I've been getting dozens (if not hundreds) of e-mail pitches from people who want to sell me lessons (webinars) in how to use social media to promote products -- some even specifically for how to promote your books if you're a writer.
First the kids, then the adults, now the merchants invade social network spaces.
Where will folks go to get away from the sales pitches?
Or the world might change in even more drastic ways as the online generation takes the helm.
I saw a TV News item where the reporters were discussing how Obama's administration can use Information Technology and the Web to create a more "transparent" government -- and one younger reporter went a step farther, pointing out that with the interactivity available online now we can have a government that we not only look in on but actually interact with.
Whether that's a good idea or not -- the public micromanaging government -- is a subject for another Worldbuilding post about Aliens and Hive Minds.
Where will people go to get away from government issues invading their private communications? I can just see pop-up ads from the government soliciting your opinion on this or that! "Help your Congressman; take this two minute survey!"
Maybe it would be illegal to block those popups!
Well, just as I couldn't resist the lure of email once I got online (my first service was called Prodigy - anybody remember that?) -- now I can't resist the social networking craze.
I'm on a whole lot of them, YouTube etc., so many I can't remember them all until I get an email that someone new wants to be my friend or link with me or whatever that service calls it. I'm active on several social networks, while lurking on a whole bunch.
Meanwhile, in addition to social networks, I've discovered ancillary Web 2.0 services that help you sort out the information blitz of the internet, especially the blogosphere. Joining this blog has led me to explorations of RSS FEEDS, bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, slashdot, -- there are more than 48 very popular ones, each with a specialty.
If you missed the step-wise development of the Feed services, you might be as overwhelmed and bewildered as I was when I started investigating RSS FEEDS. At first I thought I understood when I first saw the little orange icon. But when I asked myself how does it work and tried to do it myself -- I discovered I was totally clueless.
So I asked on LinkedIn what the best "feed reader" is and got back that Google's reader is good. Meanwhile, one of the "build a successful business online" Newsletters I get sent a file to install on the Google Reader that I could configure to track my own name as it gets mentioned on various blogs and web pages. Wow, I had no idea!
Someone on LinkedIn who is very knowledgeable recommended FeedDemon. So I went to feeddemon.com and downloaded their feed reader -- and I think it's better than google or yahoo, but each one has its strengths. So I use all 3!
Eventually, one or two of these services will emerge as dominant and providing all the tools we need to live online.
Simultaneously, via one of the e-mail Lists for professional writers that I'm on, I discovered an online interview on a blog with a woman who gives webinars on how to use social networking to promote books and other products. I learned about another service that helps consolidate all your services. It's called friendfeed.com
So I signed up for friendfeed, (where I'm JLichtenberg) and discovered that you can put a swatch of javascript on your homepage (see the bottom of http://www.slantedconcept.com for an example) or blog site like this one that will list at least some of the icons for some of the better known services that you use to post notes, messages, and even blog articles.
You'll see the new friendfeed icons for Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Rowena Cherry lower down on the right side of this blog, so you can see what I'm talking about.
This blog also has atom and RSS enabled -- you just need to put our URL into the appropriate field on your Feed Reader (click search for or add feeds -- this blog is a "feed").
If you click "subscribe to me" in the friendfeed icon you can see every time I post on facebook, amazon blog, this blog, microblog or whatever I've put into my list of places where I post things. I don't have all my places in friendfeed yet. When I do, you don't have to chase all over looking for what I'm doing, and you don't have to subscribe to a Newsletter and hope it doesn't get caught in the spam trap.
And once you've subscribed to someone via friendfeed, it's very easy to subscribe to someone ELSE -- thus consolidating the scattered postings of all your friends, or just people you want to follow.
http://friendfeed.com/jlichtenberg
http://twitter.com/JLichtenberg
This blog is registered with technorati.com which I've seen links to all over the place, but didn't understand what it is until I went there and poked around. It's huge. But the most valuable thing I've found there so far is a long article on the shape and development direction of the blogosphere.
A graphic image of what "blogosphere" means is posted at:
http://datamining.typepad.com/gallery/blog-map-gallery.html
And the technorati article on how things change (they survey once a year) is posted at:
http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/
As Linnea Sinclair said, there are dozens, maybe thousands, of valuable "get started" tools available to new writers today that didn't exist when we started. But there are even more tools available for those who have started and now need to progress up the vertical learning curve. Those tools come effortlessly to the hands of those who grew up online, but we have to work at it.
Also from LinkedIn I discovered a website called pingomatic.com which lets you list your blog and then auto-updates a number of Feed services (there are more services than readers and like search engines, feed services don't all return the same results for the same query). Technorati.com does something similar with blogs.
I still haven't mastered astrogating around Web 2.0 -- things don't work as I expect them to, and I can't tell if that's because I did it wrong, don't understand what it should do, or it really didn't work right. I sometimes feel very much like the first time I wrote a novel on a computer: spikes of I LOVE THIS embedded in a sea of confusion and bewilderment.
Still, I posted a tweet on twitter and saw it come up immediately on my friendfeed.com page. But I had to click the link labeled "ME" that I see on the left of my page (I don't think you would see my ME link, but rather your own ME link). However, the Diggs I did yesterday don't seem to be on friendfeed -- but older diggs of mine are there.
Social Networking and "feeds" are the work-around we need until the internet infrastructure can be totally redesigned (from the hardware level) to wall out "spam." The resistance will come not just from the cost of doing that, but from the commercial interests that don't want to be walled away from your inbox.
Nevertheless, I am thrilled to discover this Web 2.0 level of the new world we're building and appalled at how I'm about 4 or 5 years behind leaping the chasm (again)!
As writers, we find social networking just the thing to promote our books and keep the wheels of imagination greased. However, I don't think it will last long. With the invasion of commercial interests, people will flee again or just turn off awareness of any kind of promotional material.
As writers, we need to think about YOU'VE GOT MAIL, and how to use the platform of Web 2.0 to tell a whopping good Romance that reveals some hidden truths people would prefer weren't true. Such as the one I discussed in my post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-we-love-romance.html
As SF-Romance writers, we need to think about YOU'VE GOT MAIL as it might have been written before the word e-mail was first coined and get a grip on the sociological implications of communication advances such as maybe Web 4.0.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Linnea wrote:
-----------------
If one person has survived it, you can survive it.
One person.
------------------
Rarely have I heard a summation of the basic theme of "our" kind of literature, the binding theme between SF, Paranormal and the general Romance field.
Heroic Fiction belongs to the "Romantic" category -- in the literary sense of "larger than life" -- and that's how most people view stories about those first, or only, "one person"s Linnea is referring to.
This is a point I neglected to make in my blog post here about why we have such a perception problem with Romance.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-we-love-romance.html
And you'll notice that blog post also starts with a comment Linnea Sinclair made!
And that point is that the reason we read these stories, and the reason we prefer characters we can identify with, is that we, ourselves are tasked, perhaps karmically, with being one of those "one persons" who do "it" to demonstrate that it is possible.
We need to break through the barrier around the possible -- mostly because it's a barrier. As people climb mountains because they are there, we hurl ourselves into impossible tasks (such as finding a soul-mate and raising his kids "right") because the task is there.
Yes, SF and Romance are both genres that are about doing the impossible -- finding a Soul Mate or inventing a gadget like the Universal Translator (rumored to have been invented by Spock's human mother, Amanda Grayson) or the Internet or the Web, invented by groups of people desperate to communicate in an "impossible" way.
They did it. Now we do it without even thinking about it.
When I first heard the term e-mail, I had to ask what that meant. The explanation didn't thrill me. It sounded cumbersome and awkward. Today, there's an insurmountable barrier between me and envelopes & stamps!
I remember the wonderful Romantic Comedy, YOU'VE GOT MAIL.
http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=You%27ve+Got+Mail&x=15&y=6
WATCH OUT at that link above for pop-ups and pop-unders circumventing your anti-popup software.
Two people meet via chat online, fall in love, and later discover they already know each other but don't "like" each other all that much in the real world. At the time that movie came out, it was thought "impossible" for real love relationships to begin online.
That movie is a "show don't tell" for a lot of truths about internet socializing that non-netizens deny vigorously.
Text-only communication can reveal the true depths of personality never visible in "live" contact situations. The "sub-text" of Relationship becomes undeniable in text-only. Great movie! Powerful truth. I actually know a couple happily married for more than 10 years who met in an online fandom chat!
And that was chat by text-only! Not even video conferencing. Just text.
I think another such huge chasm as we saw between those just getting online and those who would not or could not attain internet access is opening. It is opening between e-mail and social networking online. Between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.
Social networking got its start as mostly a kiddie thing for wasting time. MySpace and so forth provided the youngest web users a way to communicate with their peers and play online.
There's nothing wrong with playing -- it's what kids have to do to become effective adults. Note Luke Skywalker's jetting around pot-shotting local vermin -- eventually, he used the same skill to take out a Deathstar. How you play and at what affects what you are able to do, and how you can do it as an adult.
So we have a generation-gap chasm opening between those who played their way to adulthood online and those who got online in adulthood. And yes, a chasm between adults who did take the plunge and adults who just have not.
Watching over their kids shoulders, the adults who dabbled online or perhaps used a computer only at work soon saw that this social networking thing is the work-around, the dodge, the cure for SPAM!
If you use, say, LinkedIn.com (professionals only; no kids, no playing) to send a message to a friend, it works just like email except that it lands in their inbox without a ton of e-spam stuck to it.
If you need to tell a few friends something quick, you can twitter or plurk or use one of the other microblog services. I'm sure three more started while I've been typing this.
Texting by simple phone connection is good, too. I worked the election Nov 4th with 7 older people and a 17 year old (Arizona program to allow youngsters to learn to work the Polls).
The 17 year old spent the intervals between voters texting with her hands under the table, looking attentive to her job. The older folks were bemused. One told a story of her college age kid who racked up a couple thousand text messages a month - until he broke up with his girlfriend, and it dropped to hundreds. Texting-romances no doubt abound!
The world is abandoning e-mail and Lists and Newsletters as fast as it can because of the spam load. Life is too short and that stuff is too putrid.
Meanwhile, personal communication has gone multi-media. Sound, images, animation -- it's all at our fingertips. Skype is very popular for international families. And I'm sure it's supporting a lot of romances.
Websites that sell things for a profit are fully interactive, some with a live-chat feature. This personalizing, multi-media, interactive approach to web applications is what they loosely term Web 2.0. Much of it functions as "plug-ins" to a browser.
The lexicon gurus still disagree about the exact definition of Web 2.0 -- but they agree that it takes a broadband connection to get the most benefit out of it.
The internet evolved into the Web which became a personal communication tool swamped by toxic waste, and cleaned up by -- SOCIAL NETWORKING.
Now I've been getting dozens (if not hundreds) of e-mail pitches from people who want to sell me lessons (webinars) in how to use social media to promote products -- some even specifically for how to promote your books if you're a writer.
First the kids, then the adults, now the merchants invade social network spaces.
Where will folks go to get away from the sales pitches?
Or the world might change in even more drastic ways as the online generation takes the helm.
I saw a TV News item where the reporters were discussing how Obama's administration can use Information Technology and the Web to create a more "transparent" government -- and one younger reporter went a step farther, pointing out that with the interactivity available online now we can have a government that we not only look in on but actually interact with.
Whether that's a good idea or not -- the public micromanaging government -- is a subject for another Worldbuilding post about Aliens and Hive Minds.
Where will people go to get away from government issues invading their private communications? I can just see pop-up ads from the government soliciting your opinion on this or that! "Help your Congressman; take this two minute survey!"
Maybe it would be illegal to block those popups!
Well, just as I couldn't resist the lure of email once I got online (my first service was called Prodigy - anybody remember that?) -- now I can't resist the social networking craze.
I'm on a whole lot of them, YouTube etc., so many I can't remember them all until I get an email that someone new wants to be my friend or link with me or whatever that service calls it. I'm active on several social networks, while lurking on a whole bunch.
Meanwhile, in addition to social networks, I've discovered ancillary Web 2.0 services that help you sort out the information blitz of the internet, especially the blogosphere. Joining this blog has led me to explorations of RSS FEEDS, bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, slashdot, -- there are more than 48 very popular ones, each with a specialty.
If you missed the step-wise development of the Feed services, you might be as overwhelmed and bewildered as I was when I started investigating RSS FEEDS. At first I thought I understood when I first saw the little orange icon. But when I asked myself how does it work and tried to do it myself -- I discovered I was totally clueless.
So I asked on LinkedIn what the best "feed reader" is and got back that Google's reader is good. Meanwhile, one of the "build a successful business online" Newsletters I get sent a file to install on the Google Reader that I could configure to track my own name as it gets mentioned on various blogs and web pages. Wow, I had no idea!
Someone on LinkedIn who is very knowledgeable recommended FeedDemon. So I went to feeddemon.com and downloaded their feed reader -- and I think it's better than google or yahoo, but each one has its strengths. So I use all 3!
Eventually, one or two of these services will emerge as dominant and providing all the tools we need to live online.
Simultaneously, via one of the e-mail Lists for professional writers that I'm on, I discovered an online interview on a blog with a woman who gives webinars on how to use social networking to promote books and other products. I learned about another service that helps consolidate all your services. It's called friendfeed.com
So I signed up for friendfeed, (where I'm JLichtenberg) and discovered that you can put a swatch of javascript on your homepage (see the bottom of http://www.slantedconcept.com for an example) or blog site like this one that will list at least some of the icons for some of the better known services that you use to post notes, messages, and even blog articles.
You'll see the new friendfeed icons for Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Rowena Cherry lower down on the right side of this blog, so you can see what I'm talking about.
This blog also has atom and RSS enabled -- you just need to put our URL into the appropriate field on your Feed Reader (click search for or add feeds -- this blog is a "feed").
If you click "subscribe to me" in the friendfeed icon you can see every time I post on facebook, amazon blog, this blog, microblog or whatever I've put into my list of places where I post things. I don't have all my places in friendfeed yet. When I do, you don't have to chase all over looking for what I'm doing, and you don't have to subscribe to a Newsletter and hope it doesn't get caught in the spam trap.
And once you've subscribed to someone via friendfeed, it's very easy to subscribe to someone ELSE -- thus consolidating the scattered postings of all your friends, or just people you want to follow.
http://friendfeed.com/jlichtenberg
http://twitter.com/JLichtenberg
This blog is registered with technorati.com which I've seen links to all over the place, but didn't understand what it is until I went there and poked around. It's huge. But the most valuable thing I've found there so far is a long article on the shape and development direction of the blogosphere.
A graphic image of what "blogosphere" means is posted at:
http://datamining.typepad.com/gallery/blog-map-gallery.html
And the technorati article on how things change (they survey once a year) is posted at:
http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/
As Linnea Sinclair said, there are dozens, maybe thousands, of valuable "get started" tools available to new writers today that didn't exist when we started. But there are even more tools available for those who have started and now need to progress up the vertical learning curve. Those tools come effortlessly to the hands of those who grew up online, but we have to work at it.
Also from LinkedIn I discovered a website called pingomatic.com which lets you list your blog and then auto-updates a number of Feed services (there are more services than readers and like search engines, feed services don't all return the same results for the same query). Technorati.com does something similar with blogs.
I still haven't mastered astrogating around Web 2.0 -- things don't work as I expect them to, and I can't tell if that's because I did it wrong, don't understand what it should do, or it really didn't work right. I sometimes feel very much like the first time I wrote a novel on a computer: spikes of I LOVE THIS embedded in a sea of confusion and bewilderment.
Still, I posted a tweet on twitter and saw it come up immediately on my friendfeed.com page. But I had to click the link labeled "ME" that I see on the left of my page (I don't think you would see my ME link, but rather your own ME link). However, the Diggs I did yesterday don't seem to be on friendfeed -- but older diggs of mine are there.
Social Networking and "feeds" are the work-around we need until the internet infrastructure can be totally redesigned (from the hardware level) to wall out "spam." The resistance will come not just from the cost of doing that, but from the commercial interests that don't want to be walled away from your inbox.
Nevertheless, I am thrilled to discover this Web 2.0 level of the new world we're building and appalled at how I'm about 4 or 5 years behind leaping the chasm (again)!
As writers, we find social networking just the thing to promote our books and keep the wheels of imagination greased. However, I don't think it will last long. With the invasion of commercial interests, people will flee again or just turn off awareness of any kind of promotional material.
As writers, we need to think about YOU'VE GOT MAIL, and how to use the platform of Web 2.0 to tell a whopping good Romance that reveals some hidden truths people would prefer weren't true. Such as the one I discussed in my post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-we-love-romance.html
As SF-Romance writers, we need to think about YOU'VE GOT MAIL as it might have been written before the word e-mail was first coined and get a grip on the sociological implications of communication advances such as maybe Web 4.0.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
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