I’ve been trying to approach social media like content feeds, dividing up the sort of material I like to post into different streams — Facebook for the personal stuff, Twitter for cultural links, my website for my writing and comics, AuthorsGoneWild for my amateur porn videos. But the process has been driving me crazy. Crazier. Trying to decide what should get posted in which feed sometimes makes me feel like I’m suffering from multiple personality disorder. And it seems to me that most people aren’t using multiple social networks — they’re choosing one and largely staying within that one. Especially as most social services — all? — now have ways of subscribing to other services, or have enabled cross-posting. There’s very little duplication of my friends across the various services I use. Which means my Facebook friends aren’t reading my Twitter posts and vice versa. Or they’re all using pseudonyms. Perhaps I have only one reader, stalking me under a community of fake identities. I can only hope I inspire such passion in someone.

So rather than keep trying to divide myself up, I’m going to treat every service as a sort of lifestream. I’m going to publish more or less the same content on each of my services, using my website as the central hub. Yes, it is rather cylonesque. Hopefully the end result will be better than BSG. I assume people will tune in on the platform of their choice, and my job is to offer my posts on as many services as I think make sense. Like those ads at the back of alt-weekly papers. It’s all fairly automated, so it’s not really extra work for me. But if you’re one of the few subscribed to me on multiple services, you may want to pare your feed list. Or subscribe to all my other feeds!

To facilitate this, I have profiles on several services. Use whichever one makes the most sense to you. I do monitor all of them, and I have alerts set up on all of them, so I will respond to comments made on each service. Unless I think you’re spam. In which case, I have already wired the money to your bank account in Liechtenstein. When do the royal jewels arrive?

Here’s the list:

Peterdarbyshire.com. My personal website. Where you’re reading this.

Amplify. I’ve started using this to post to Twitter and Facebook. It has the same openness and ease of use as Twitter, but it’s much more flexible. I’m not actually a fan of Twitter, because I find its character count too restrictive, and it’s almost impossible to follow a conversation. But Twitter hit critical mass first, so everyone’s on it. I hope more people switch to Amplify, because I think it’s better, but only time will tell. It has a great clipping feature too!

Twitter. I mainly use this through Hootsuite to watch my lists. Like I said above, I post through Amplify, although not exclusively.

Facebook. It’s where I tend to put the more personal stuff, because that’s where most of my closest friends and family are. That’ll probably continue, but I’ll monitor it as my friends list grows.

Friendfeed. A good service but little used. It’s good for collecting people’s different life feeds. It doesn’t seem to have caught on, which is too bad.

Tumblr. I’ve created a Tumblr account that’s fed by my website and my other accounts, for those people who like to use Tumblr for easy reposts, etc.

Flickr. Where I store my photos. Mainly random iPhone shots and the like. I post most of them to my website and Twitter anyway, but not all of them. I have Flickr set up to automatically post to Facebook.

Goodreads. My book reviews. My Goodreads account is subscribed to my blog, so you can read most of what I post through Goodreads if you like. I also repost on Goodreads some of the shorts I publish at peterdarbyshire.com.

Fictionaut. A sort of social networking and literary site. I’m new to it, but it’s been a lot of fun so far. I repost the shorts from peterdarbyshire.com here.

If you use a service that I haven’t listed here, then send me a note and I’ll consider setting up a profile on it. Except for Google Buzz. I tried that already and most of the people I knew hated it.

What I’ve been reading this week:

– The collapse of the Damien Hirst art market (Economist) — Hirst has made hundreds of millions of dollars from selling stuffed sharks and diamond-encrusted skulls to those with even more money. But it seems his fans have been more investors than art lovers. When he started flooding the market with more creations, and bypassing dealers, prices plummeted. So was it a bad move by an artist businessman? Or was it the action of an artist trying to reclaim control of his works from the market?

– Will systempunkt be the blitzkrieg for stateless terrorist groups? (Global Guerillas) — I think it already is. The real question is its efficacy. John Robb points to the threatened Koran burning as an example of the social pressure points that can be exploited to cause broader system chaos and collapse.

– neo lebowski — The Matrix meets the Dude in this YouTube mashup. I wonder how the Church of the Latter-day Dude feels about this.

– We have the technology to build the world’s first bionic kidney (Discover) — I suspect there’s more of a market for bionic livers in North America.

– Life always finds a way (Life, Unbounded blog) — To go extinct. In fact, it seems life is prone to extinction.

– What the paparazzi drive (Globe and Mail) — Satisfying the needs of both stakeout and speed. And camera platform. The existence of the paparazzi troubles me. The fact they’re driving nicer cars than me troubles me even more.

– Geek and Gamer Girls Song (Break music video) — See, ladies, all you need to do to attract guys is engage in some role-playing games. Also, I want to be Seth Green. Following in the esteemed tradition of Do You Wanna Date My Avatar (YouTube) and Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury (YouTube).

The new book has me researching famous Roman gladiators and learning about their fighting styles. Strange days indeed.

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I swear to Giger I actually took this photo outside an abattoir.

Just because I’m not busy enough with all my social networking services, I joined Fictionaut the other day. It’s actually a pretty fun and interesting site that’s devoted to community building around literature. Think Facebook meets Goodreads, only with the lit right there on the site instead of linking to books on Amazon. It’s got the wall, the ability to message people and comment on posts, etc.

I posted some of the shorts I’ve published here and had a great response from people. It’s really lovely to be instantaneously involved in a conversation with people you don’t know about something you’ve written.

There’s also some really interesting work being published on it as well. I haven’t had too much time to do a lot of reading on the site because, you know, the baby and all, but I think it’s a place you could be happily lost in for some time.

Check it out and if you want to join, add me to your contacts.

My desktop after a long day writing — Ikeaspace desktop, not cyberspace:

I just finished George Murray‘s Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms, and it’s so good I’m going to back and read it again. Each aphorism is a fortune cookie of apocalypse. Here’s the full review I posted over at Goodreads:

“George Murray’s Glimpse is an irresistible force meeting an unmovable object in your mind. Forget five stars — this book deserves its own constellation.”

Here’s the aphorism I could have easily dropped into The Warhol Gang:

“When we die we are finally impersonating no one.”

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Good news! We’re hiring again!

I’ve already got an iTunes account, so I joined Ping. Just search for me by name.

I’ll be making an appearance at Vancouver’s Word on the Street, Sunday, Sept. 26, at 3:40. I’ll be at the Authors Tent, in between readings by Susan Juby and Lee Henderson, who are both great writers and awesome people. It’s going to be an interesting hour!

The WOTS readings are longer than most literary readings — 20 minutes — so I’m planning on talking a bit about the writing of The Warhol Gang, and some of the things that influenced it. But I’m also game for questions from the audience.

As always, I’ll bring some special prizes for people who come to the event and buy a book. At previous readings I’ve given away a couple hundred postcard comics and even some lottery tickets. We’ll see what I show up with this time.

And hey, if you want to post/tweet/update about this, the offer of a free unpublished story still stands.

Hope to see you there!