Just thoughts – Page 171 – … rambling and sometimes random at that

Some of my friends and colleagues know I’ve been using brightkite to record my location, usually from my BlackBerry, but occasionally from the web. I used to feed brightkite direct into twitter so that any posts or pictures would also get referenced to fellow twitterers, but aware that this can also be an annoyance, I’ve chosen to chnage the default so that I just update my location in twitter, and just send a message saying where I am, then it’s up to anyone to see where I am and what I’m up to.

I’ve been doing this for quite a while, doing it manually using the mobile web interface on brightkite, waiting for the GPS on the BB to feed brightkite to make it that little bit easier for me. Hasn’t happened yet, but Fire Eagle [now defunct] has landed and EagleFeed [now defunct] has emerged which makes the business of “publishing your location” that little bit easier.

What’s new is that using EagleFeed, my location can be fed out to any blog, or website, or anything that accepts an RSS, or Atom feed. This enables mashups and other location related material to be incorporated in pages – I know I’ll find a use for this someday, probably linked to photography.

Being on leave, with nothing to do apart from sit and think is great fun! It allows you to pick a tweet and reflect, and then reply in a more considered manner.

Another tweet this afternoon from @elsua, provided below …

Wish people’d understand a single line in your Twitter profile, i.e. your nick, is not going anywhere. Tell us some more about you! Pic, bio

… made we wonder. Perhaps somebody must have tweeted something that Luis Suarez felt was interesting enough to wonder “Who is this? Do they have credibility?” However, the truth of the matter is that many of us twitter and blog on the sidelines, we’re actually micro-publishing to a community that knows us, not broadcasting to the world. In so doing we’re interested if others come to read what we’ve written, but that’s really not our mission. And so, we don’t give away too much about ourselves, just in case the context of our communications is misrepresented.

When I tweet, or blog on this site, I do so in my own name, not as a representative of the organisation that employs me – as I’ve said previously – that I’ll do on the corporate blogging platform. So on twitter, I don’t give myself away, however a Direct Message to me, or a little bit of detective work, will soon reveal who I really am.