The Dual Life

Do you lead a dual life? One your real life and the second one on line?

Most of you will be. It has become almost essential to have an online life that represents yourself to the online community. To distinguish you among the umpteen anonymous users. To voice your ideas and opinions.

The things I will be telling you will include things you know already and things you might not be knowing. If you are an internet journalist and are up to date with the services that opened to the public lately, then it will be helpful if you make this post valuable via your valuable comments! If not, then feel free to read on about living life on the internet, connecting our dual life and making the most out of it.

What best represents you online? Is it your emailid, website, blog, orkut or facebook profile? Here is an account of my own online journey. I am sure it shall strike a chord with your own. I have blogged about all the services I have registered and use (because it was and is necessary. I might have not mentioned a few of them.) And what has to be done to bring them all together to represent you best.

When I actually started using the internet, in 2000( or was it in 2004, never mind) i didn’t have an identity. At that time I didn’t know about blogs, who can set up a website and how useful an email id is.

Websites, Emails and Blogs

Then I had some bizarre idea and thought of creating my web site. Yes, I didn’t even have an email id and I was going into hosting my own website (of course, my own means not my domain, but some free domain). Yahoo was hip those days and my dad helped me create a page for myself on the internet in geocities. I have long stopped maintaining it. But it’s still online and very well available. 

The wonderous thing was, there were visitors to my website then. I had thrown a number of links on the website and categorised them into groups for people to use. I called it JKRWorld. And with that I got my first email id in Yahoo! Mail.

From there on, I have become more and more experienced in my life both off- and on- line. Then came GMail. Because of it’s invite feature, I thought it was something big, and had my father register an account for me. The username (jithinkr) later on became my handle, an online identity. Then came blogging. I started off in some free domain, which I have no idea what it was. The idea of monetizing blog and making money out of ad revenue caught my interest. Blogger being a google product was trustworthy. But it wasn’t satisfactory. I moved on to wordpress and loved it there. And since I have been with wordpress. I used to blog at Novice Investigator.

WordPress.com blogs did not permit advertisements on their blogs. But I had come to realise that these were more than just money. Blogging had become a passion for me. And my blog represented me. My blog has been of great help to me. It gave the exposure, experience and the recognition. (I may not be recognized like Darren is but, still I like the recognition I get).

Social Networks

I do not remember when I started using orkut. Think it was in 2006. But I loved the idea of social networking. Finding friends with similar interests. Discussions and flame wars in communities. Discovering security issues and exploiting them. Again, I blogged about them and got a loyal set of readers. 

I remember that there was a surge of social networking sites at that time. LinkedIn, Hi5, MySpace, Facebook and so on. But I stuck with Orkut. Being a google product gave it a mark against the other services.

Recently I started using Facebook and finding it more comfortable and fun than Orkut, mainly because of the polls and also because most of my friends are there. It’s easier to communicate and comment in facebook. I haven’t ditched orkut and still continue using it.

Micro Blogging

In recent times we have this micro blogging services. If you have heard of twitter then you should be very well knowing it about. You blog with contents less than 140 words in twitter. It’s faster and easier to let people know what you are upto. It lets people who care about you know what you are planning to do. It’s like sending your friends a group message. The guys at Common Craft have this great video called “Twitter in Plain English“, that you can watch to better understand twitter and micro blogging services.

Tumble Logging

A variant to blogs, these make up short posts rarely text and mostly made of videos, pictures, links and sound clips. Tumblr is a free tumble log service. You can visit My Tumblr Page as an example. Tumblelogs help to make a blog out of things you come across online, like videos, links, photos and other blogs. It’s like sharing content and helping your friends come to know of the things that was interesting to you online.

Social Bookmarks

You come across lot of awesome websites online. You just love your browsers bookmarking option, because it helps you get back to the link and read it again whenver you want! But the bad thing is, with more bookmarking it isn’t just so easy to use them. And when you are forced to use a new system, you don’t have the bookmarks with you. There comes online bookmarking facilities. There is more goodness to social bookmarks, because you can access your bookmarks anytime you want and can also discover useful websites from other peoples bookmarks. Common Craft is the best place to learn these things the easy way. Learn all about social bookmarking using the video, “Social Bookmarking in Plain English“. I use Delicious for my social bookmarks. And I love it!

Micro Reviewing

I came to know that there were services that let you review movies you watch and services you use recently. It’s Blippr. It apes a twitter like idea and permits reviews of only 160 words. Hence the name micro reviewing. At present am not very active in reviewing things on Blippr, but it’s a great place!

I am alive at a lot of places! How many services do you use?

GReader, Twitter, Blippr, Tumblr, Delicious, Facebook. Hmmm..

I read this somewhere. 

Whenever someone visits my blog, the first thing they find is that it’s been some time since I had blogged. Though I would have been online and updated my status on all other sites, I wouldn’t have got time to blog. It would be nice if all those posts featured at the same place, so that my home page is a well updated site, brimming with information about me. About where I am, what I have been upto, what I discovered recently and what my opinion about the world and the internet’s current state is. The best would be aggregating all my posts to all those services, disjointed services. Un-dis-jointing my posts from all those services.

Lifestreams

A collection of all your online status, your tweets, your favorites, your pictures and your video uploads. All at one place. There are several services that make this possible. You can even feature it within your blog. (There are wordpress themes designed to include lifestreaming. Agregado is an example). There are websites like Soup.io, Storytlr that do just this. Of course, they have their own unique features. Say like, Soup.io is a tumblelog + lifestreaming, and Storytlr has the unique feature of making a story based on your online updates. My lifestream on soup.io is jithinrk@soup.io. It’s made of only my twitter feeds and delicious feeds.

There are softwares like SweetCron and Amplifeeder that lets you set up a website just for lifestreaming. 

Why Lifestreams?

It collects all your profiles and your feeds and displays it at one place, your homepage, website or blog. Your lifestream represents the complete you online. Complete information at a single place. It helps people who like to follow you, who like to know you. And hey! watch out for stalkers!

P.S.: It took me more than 5 hours to complete this post. Wonder why?

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