Footprint

My on-line footprint consists of the following:

• My profile on Linked-in - I’ve had a profile on Linked-in for a year or so. For a business focused network – I don’t think I’ve contributed to or received many benefits because of my membership, although my expectations for the immediate future were zero.
• My Facebook account – I can find people going to the same events as me, I can find people with similar interests to me, and I can keep in touch with friends and family.
• A couple of diggs - 37 items dugg since I bothered registering. Digg is a nice site for finding news stories, but I find myself returning less these days and I put that down to Google reader.
• An article and a few comments on Slashdot - looks like my account has been deleted.
• Membership of forums - mainly sports and technology related.
• Flickr - photo’s for friends and family around the globe. I like Flickr, but it is a pain to tag 300 freaking photos every month. Although some people will no doubt say if I can’t be bothered to tag it I shouldn’t post it to Flickr. I wish Yahoo/Flickr would solve that problem for me. Based on a small training set of say 20-30 photos; mechanical turk or otherwise it’d make me a happy punter.
• My 11 month old son’s blog - someone has to type his babbles for the rest of the family…
• Comments on others blogs – occasional comments on technical blogs like Jeffery Palermo and Scott Hanselman.
• My tumblelog – my link blog available here and in RSS. A few months ago I read an excellent article about tumblelogs and tumblr. After about 30 seconds I had my low maintenance tumblelog up and running.
• My shared items on Google reader -  available here and in RSS. Google Reader is my third most visited site after Google and gmail. Google Reader is excellent (but sucks on my Blackberry); I’m able to take RSS feeds from the sites I would visit every week and have new content from these sites pushed to one place. Not only that, I’m then able to share the items that I think are interesting with other RSS savvy people. I’m also able to consume their shared items – it’s solid gold.

What’s missing from the list? 

• MySpace account - I missed the whole MySpace thing; partly because I was living under a rock and partly because none of my friends were using it and partly due to my age. (I’ll talk more about MySpace another day)
• A blog - aha!

Why now? It’s clear that much of my footprint is a residual affect of completing another goal; as discussed with digg and Google reader I’m reading the work of others and approving it for others; with linked-in I’m building a trusted business network that others can see, with facebook my friends know once I found a new hot TV show.This blog is an effort to address what I perceive to be an imbalance – this is a conscious contribution to my footprint.