One of the things that I am coming to realize as I blog more things more often is that I don’t necessarily want a one-size-fits-all single blog where everything goes. I really enjoy posting short links to breaking science news stories at science.status.net, but I wouldn’t want each and every one of those links to go on my portfolio page, for instance. The same goes for my blip.fm streaming audio. There are different audiences and types of content among my various blogs and micro-blogs, and a certain amount of redundancy in case one service goes belly-up.
We are reaching the point where even non-technical people (literal and proverbial grandmothers) have both a Facebook page and a Twitter account, if not multiple other social networking accounts.
Many people have concerns that we are reaching a point where the information gets fragmented, and companies like Facebook are trying to add ever more features to their service to encourage people to use only Facebook for all their online communication needs. Rather than try to fight this trend, I think the best thing to do is actually to embrace the fragmentation. People need several blogs (or dozens), depending on their needs and the nature of their audience.
As Internet consumers (and producers, since we are becoming both), it’s important for us to demand that all the services we use to publish content work together and support flexible copyright licensing, rather than put all of our eggs in one basket.
