Tag Archive for 'blip.fm'

You may have noticed that I now post nightly.  You may have also noticed that I’m cheating.  I’ve become a slave to the internets constant need for attention, and my own constant need to let people know what I’m doing, when and how and what I’m listening to as I do it.

Twitter.com: This thing is addictive, especially when you have a cell phone with unlimited texting.  The way I’ve been describing it to people is “like the status updates on the facebook or the myspace, only without the facebook or the myspace”, to which I usually get a blank stare and a “Oh, I see.”

So, you go and set up a Twitter account.  You do this, and then it wants you to tell the world what you’re doing. And you do, in texts of 140 characters or less. And then anybody who is watching the main Twitter stream, may catch that you’re “Surfing the internets for hamster porn” or “Talking to mom on the phone, blah blah blah” or whatever. Or if you’re not a caveman like I was until lately, you can do it from your cell phone.  So now people may see that you’re “having coffee at the muddy cup”, or “In line at the bank” or even “This movie sucks, why did I think that a chihuahua cartoon movie would fill the hole in my soul?”.

If your friends have Twitter accounts as well, you can follow them and they can follow you, so that your status update will post to their twitter page or cell phone should they so choose, and they’ll know where you’re drinking coffee, and can meet you there so that they can tweet “meeting AngryBob for coffee at the muddy cup”.  That’s what a twitter post is called, by the way.  A Tweet.

I sound like I may be mocking this. I assure you, I am.  A little. Because at the same time, I love this.

I’ve added a “Twitter Tools” plugin to my blog here, so that my Tweets can also be followed in the sidebar of my page–seriously, just look to the right of your screen–and so that a digest of my daily tweets will post as a single blog entry at 11:58pm.  That’s where the Two Minutes To Midnight post comes from. But you’ve probably figured that out by now. It also tweets an announcement when I actually post something here, other than the automatic tweet digest. There’s also a Facebook app. that allows you to use your tweets as a status update on your facebook page, which is why it kind of looks like I spend more time on facebook than I actually do.

That brings me to the Blip.

Blip.fm: Blip.fm is just like Twitter, but they don’t care what you’re doing. Just what you’re listening to while you’re doing it.  The setup is pretty much the same as Twitter, but now you’re a ‘DJ’ with a search box that allows you to look up songs by artist or title, preview them and then ‘blip’ them.  You can add 140 characters of text, just like twitter (though some I think get used up by the url link to the song, which is fairly short). It gets posted and your song played on the main blip.fm page, and like twitter, you can follow certain DJ’s and have other DJ’s following you. There’s also a ‘props’ system in place so that you can give and recieve props for amazing muscial choices (or just because you think the DJ’s cute and you don’t give a fuck what he/she plays, not that I would do that. All my props are based on the excellent musical choices that the cute DJ’s play).

To make it even better, it can be linked to your twitter so that when you blip you tweet.  I personally call this a ‘bleet’.  Which is probably what other people call it if they are wise like me. If you don’t want to bleet your blip to those who follow the tweets, you can always start your blip with an ‘!’ which keeps it off the twitter. I have a couple of people who may or may not be following me over their cell phones and may be getting annoyed when I’m blipping heavily, so I do this unless I want to share them with the twitter/facebook crowd. Usually, there’s two at least that I share.  My wake-up call to the internets, and then my lullaby before bed.

I do this bceause I am a nice guy.

Facebook: I’m sorry to all you new-look facebook haters. But the new facebook look/layout is much improved over the old one. Unlike many others, I want to use the facebook to network and socialilze with people I may have forgotten, or at least forgotten why we no longer socialized in the first place.

I don’t want to join your mob. I don’t want to join your pirate ship, I don’t want to take millions of quizes (though I, on occasion, will take one or two).  The old facebook threw all of those requests in your face when you logged on.  It hurt my head.  Now they’re nicely tucked away in a sidebar so that I can peruse them at my liesure, ignore what I want easily and do what seems like fun when I have time. New facebook rules for me. And I don’t even go to myspace anymore unless I remember that a few friends use it to contact me about stuff going on (even though they use facebook too).

And this is what I do when I should be working.

Follow me,

AB

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