The New Media Diva

About two weeks ago, I subscribed to a service that allowed me to place my entire online presence in one place. One of the services I could bring in was FriendFeed. I can’t remember the name of the service because I sign up to new services every week.

That means that I can import a service that’s supposed to aggregate my online presence into another service that can aggregate my online presence.

It was at that point that I began to feel old and out of the loop. Wait. No. I started to feel old and out of the loop a while back.

Or that I was stuck in some type of social media loop.

Is it just me or is social online media reaching critical mass? When it gets to the point where you can aggregate your aggregated content on an aggregator, something is amiss.

Or I really am getting old and can’t keep up. Yeah, maybe that’s it.

FriendFeed, Plurk, Vox, Toluu, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Mashable…and those are the ones I can remember in five seconds.

*diversion alert*

There are some sites that stand out in my mind and I make a point of visiting when I have time:

• Newscred: On Newscred, one can aggregate news from papers and blogs selected by the Newscred staff. The focus of the site is that visitors can vote on the credibility of the story or the correspondent. Of course, credibility is relative and the site isn’t perfect (analytics page wouldn’t come up for me, but maybe that’s a Firefox issue), but I give anyone props for a) diving into ranking something as sticky as credibility and b) trying something new. Newscred is in private alpha at the moment. I thought I had invites but just checked my account and couldn’t find anymore invites. I’ll see if I can ask for more.
• Viddler: I’ve mentioned Viddler before. I love the tight-knit community. In terms of video, the pop-ups that you can insert in your video are what sold me over YouTube.
• Witness: If you have any interest in how audio and video on the Web can influence human rights, you should check out Witness. The site allows folks to upload video evidence of human rights violations with the hope that the evidence will go viral and create change…or at least outrage.
• Alive in Baghdad: Not an online community, but it features the work of Iraqi journalists in the field.
• I used to peep NowPublic but the folks there have just lost my respect because of this.

*diversion alert over*

As for checking out aggregated content (to remember what I’ve posted where and check out what online friends have posted), yes, I do use FriendFeed…but I don’t post there. I don’t even get why the site even offers that functionality when it could just let you aggregate. Replying to posts there is too confusing for me because I don’t know exactly where to respond to a friend’s post…in FriendFeed or on the site where they posted.

Goodness. What exactly is the purpose of this post? I think I’m just on a rant about how absolutely, positively crowded social media is becoming (and since it’s social, I guess it should be crowded) and my efforts to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Part two is coming up.