echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null

At the time, I noted the way that more and more information that was once delivered by independent web sites was now being delivered directly by search engines, and that rather than linking out to others, there were strong signs of a trend towards keeping the link flow to themselves.

Is Linking to Yourself the Future of the Web? - O'Reilly Radar

I may exist in a bubble¹ but it seems to me that an opposing tension is emerging. Twitter has been used² by many people as a search and question answering service, as has FriendFeed more recently. Aparently people find things like Digg useful too³. By their nature, the organic links in these serves are mostly external, though of course both services are somewhat limited by the number of followers someone has.

1. Yes, I exist in a bubble. ↩
2. Yes, when it worked, fine. ↩
3. Though for the life of me, I cannot work out why. ↩

Something thing I find frustrating about del.icio.us (yes, I like the dots) is that you don't know who anybody is. As a participating member of the Habari project I keep an eye on mentions of Habari all over the place. One of those places is Twitter, via a Tweet Scan feed for Habari, so that I get an item in my feed reader when someone tweets about Habari. When I have the chance, I visit the user's Twitter page, have a look at what they said, maybe visit their blog, and generally reply to them. This might be ...

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Occasional ads in the Twitter timeline ... seems like the only real way to monetize Twitter, aside for premium subscriptions. The only question remaining is how Twitter users will accept the move after a two year free ride.

• Twitter Testing Advertising In Twitter Streams
...

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I signed up to FriendFeed a few days ago, after a sustained sales pitch from Andy C, who 7 minutes later asked if I "got it" yet. I've been mulling it over and while I'm not sure I completely get it, I will say that I'm getting there. Got it? I've never used a social aggregator before, and from some of the commentary I've read (and promptly lost), that's probably a good thing. The most interesting thing about FriendFeed is not the aggregation but the interaction that can take place after something shows up in a feed, which has ...

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My new buddy Andy C recently said to me:

I used to enjoy blogging a lot more and I actually have a couple of humourous blog articles that I am genuinely quite fond - no more than that - proud of. Twitter is just the ultimate in 'disposable' blogging. All that crap posted from Heathrow T5 just fills my time in. It's hardly earth shattering, is it? God - I can't remember any of those stupid tweets (apart from the lads in Yellow Lurex suits that was pretty funny) let alone be proud of all those throwaway one-liners.

But Twitter ...

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When travelling, I keep a journal. I've been doing this for almost eight years now, with varying degrees of commitment, and have filled a couple of moleskines. This last trip to Iran is the first trip I've done since I started blogging and using Twitter, but I realised that I've been doing both for years, albeit low tech paper based blogging and tweets. Typically I'll have a couple of entries like, "Mannequins are freaky enough but someone got an import deal in Iran for extra freaky mannequins" and "Found veggie soups!" and then a longer entry about somewhere we've visited ...

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