Facebook and Blogger Design

Blogger and Facebook
I see that I can have my blog automatically post as a note on Facebook. (Click here if you want to know how.) On the face of it, this seems like a nice feature. But it didn't take long to figure out that I'm not going to do it.

For more than a decade, I have moved between two different worlds. First, there is my "real life" world. The people who populate this world have faces and voices and talk not only to me but to each other when I'm not around. They know me by what I say, by my body language, by what I look like, by what others think about me. They hear my voice and enter my life with a physical presence. Few of them focus much attention on me specifically. Few of them care what I think about either Blogger or Facebook.

My other world is an online world. In this world, there are no voices, only typed words on a page. I type posts such as this and people show up to read them. Many are strangers coming in off the search engines. Others, I know only from the internet. Only a few are part of my "real life" world.

Facebook is a place where my two worlds intersect. It's actually a place where many worlds intersect for many people. It specializes in one-liners. "Marsha is typing a blog post." Does someone trying to keep up with 100 friends really want to know more than that? If they do, it's not hard to find this blog.

I have often told people that the key to survival in a small town is to be so boring that no one cares to talk about you. "Marsha who? Who's that and why would I care what she did? Don't you have anything better than that to tell me?" I find blogging to fit into that same pattern. Most people don't care to read my ponderings. Even though this blog is easily picked up by the search engines, I'm counting on the fact that only people who are truly interested in reading it because they have some level of appreciation for what I write will bother to come by more than once. Thus, I can share things here that I wouldn't necessarily share with everyone I know. Force-feeding these posts to my Facebook friends, whether from "real life" or from other internet settings, seems way too "in your face" for me. It's a neat concept that I can see would work for other people and I hope my mindset doesn't discourage you if you're interested in doing it, but I myself am not ready to invite that level of exposure.

So if you're here from a search engine, you're just getting in on some thoughts. If you're a regular visitor, thanks for coming by. I appreciate your interest.
Posted by Marsha Lynn at 9:44 PM
7 comments:
Keith said...
I was on the fence with doing this but your post convinced me it's a bad idea. Ideally what I would like is if there is some kind of widget with blog summaries that my facebook friends would see /only/ if they decide to look at my wall. I haven't found a way to do that yet but I'm hoping it's possible...

5:33 PM
Nexus Khan said...
i gotta agree with this... forcing it upon the readers is definitely not a permissible readership approach...

2:42 AM
Phillip said...
I really like what you say here. I found your blog by accident. I did a google search on facebook blogger to try to find out how to delink my blogger account from facebook and your blog showed up in one of the results. Your link helped me delink the accounts. But, I like what you say about not wanting to shove your posts into your friends face. I feel the same way.

12:24 PM
Keith said...
FWIW I'm now using http://apps.facebook.com/rss-connect/presentation.php which let me create a tab for my blog that only appears when a friend views my wall/profile. So far I like it...

12:56 PM
ai said...
You're certainly right. why would people care to know what your doing. i also agree about not showing it to people's or friends face..



9:56 PM
Anonymous said...
Hi, I'm a search engine visitor with the same fb+blog intentions and I totally agree with every line! Thanks!

10:24 PM
Kevin said...
Thanks for the reminder. I mean, what makes blogging fun is that all our voices are like diamonds in rums you have to find. :)

Kategoriler: Facebook and Blogger Design