Good friends know I’m a politics junkie. So I’m struggling this morning to reprogram my brain not to type http://pollster.com/blogs/ every 3-5 minutes. (XKCD, as usual, is on point.) I usually use a hacked up greasemonkey script for this, but today someone pointed me at leechblock, which looks completely awesome- lets you say ‘for this group of sites, if I go to them during this period of time, instead redirect me to something more useful.’ So, for example, will now block me from using my blog reader after 9am, and going to individual blogs or planets as well. I know other friends have this problem, so here you are. :)
Relatedly, my identi.ca posts are now getting filtered out to twitter and from there to facebook. I’m not really a fan of the conversational nature of these tools- if I’d wanted to have conversations/interrupts all day long I would have continued to use IRC. So I refuse to check any of the sites regularly, or use a tool that pops them up like an IM. That said, it seems obvious that if I participate in them at all as an author-publisher I’m going to continue to get interesting and sometimes very useful responses. (My election-morning dents garnered replies that included what would have been an interesting party invite and a strong memory from an old friend, but I didn’t see either until nearly 48 hours later.)
So here is the question- is there some sort of ‘delayed twit’ tool that will gather responses from identi.ca/twitter/facebook every… dunno, hourly or twice daily or something, and email them to me? I guess I can use one of the rss2email scripts, but if there is something more elegant, I’d love to know. (Yes, I know email is another form of interrupt, but it is one, centralized form of interrupt which I have decent tools for dealing with already.)
I drop all my identi.ca stuff into Google reader via the RSS feed and pick them up at leisure during a poll cycle. They’re centralized along with everything else that I want to read and is fairly easy to manage. I suspect you could do similar with whatever feed reader you’re using. Or use something like Google alerts if email is really what you’re looking for.
Also, there’s a “openmicroblogging” application on facebook that will hoover in your identi.ca feed without having to go through twitter. I use it and it seems to work well though not a lot of people seem to use it.
Hrm, I can’t find that openmicroblogging app- shame.
Maybe reader is the right place for that; I tend to do reader only once a day and in a low-interaction environment, though. (read: on an elliptical trainer.)But maybe that is the right way to do these sorts of things.
Direct link:
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=29521195395
As far as reader goes, I organize my tags so there are a few tags I check during poll cycles during the day, and the rest stay collapsed until I have some more time. To a certain degree this lets me have my cake and eat it to, though my workload is fairly interrupt heavy….
What about friendfeed? They have some nice tools for that kind of stuff:
http://friendfeed.com/about/tools