Taking social stock (pt 2)

As we bid farewell to 2008, I’m looking again at the places I’ve been spending my time online. Last time, I attempted to chart all the places where I actively create content. I decided this time to catalog just the sites I use the most, and try to classify the activities that take place on each. I came up with these categories:

• consume
  RSS feeds in Google Reader, music on Last.fm, all sorts of stuff on miscellaneous sites
• collect
  links on Delicious, contact info on LinkedIn, all sorts of activity on FriendFeed
• curate
  images and links on Tumblr and imgfave
• converse
  conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and various groups and forums, commenting on blogs, email
• create
  photos on Flickr, slideshows on SlideShare, posting on this blog, Cultivate Creativity, and guest posts on other blogs like Design Charlotte and CLT Blog.

Some of these sites span multiple categories (e.g. – most sites have features that support conversation), and I do show some crossing over between two, but I’ve just tried to show the categories they fit in best, based on my most typical uses. I’ve also started drawing the connections that track the flow of info from one site to another. I’m mostly interested in how publishing can be automated, so in future explorations I want to try to focus on individual flows (e.g. – a photo on Flickr is used in a blog post, which gets automatically published to the Twitter feed, and aggregated in FriendFeed).