A little editorial: Blogging more on my3books, posting fewer links on Facebook

Maybe it's been sheer laziness on my part (maybe?? hell yes, it's laziness...), but I've been putting more little clicky bits and things to read up on Facebook because it's just so darn easy, and I've been putting less and less up on my3books this year.  It's not that I'm reading less, or have fewer cool books to talk about, or have fewer opinions.

But the sheer ease-of-use with which you can post stuff on Facebook makes it a simpler path to choose. (Simpler only in terms of how simple it is to share things with my network of "friends" there on Facebook, not necessarily more simple when it comes to global clicky hegemony by our overlords at Facebook et al.)  They've just got those little "Share" buttons all over the web.  Who wouldn't click them?

I've been pondering this for a couple of weeks, reading all those articles about Facebook's privacy settings hell and their 500 million users.  The final straw was this terrific post by Teresa Nielson Hayden on Making Light about posting videos and required cross-linking between YouTube and Gmail and Facebook: 

I said no. I especially and particularly said no to your happy plan to take that crosslinked pair of accounts and propagate god-knows-what information from them to Facebook. For my benefit, you said. So my friends can find me, and see what I’m doing, and I can see what they’re doing. Which is utter codswallop, because it’s really about you and Facebook getting to track who my friends are and what information I share with them, the better to market to us all

So I'm going to try slogging uphill a bit more often and make the conscious choice to put more of those things that I would otherwise share on Facebook up on my3books.com instead.  It's time to work harder at maintaining my corner of the larger Web - I guess I would really rather build my web out in the open instead of contributing more links to a very over-built web inside the box that Facebook has constructed. 

Comments

[Jane]

Thank you! I'd much rather read what you and other folks have to say in more than 140 characters, anyway!

[Melanie]

Glad to hear this. I mostly avoid Facebook and would rather read your posts here. (I tend to look to Twitter for links to interesting posts and sites.)

[Angela K Sherrill]

Good for you and us, John. As someone who has never used Facebook--in order to avoid family drama, missing hours lost at the laptop, and other marketing nonsense--I'm glad to see you coming home.
--Angela