Working On The Streamflow: A Microstreaming Workflow

Ok, I know I am a bit compulsive about trying to get the workflow straightened out where Twittering, blogging, and bookmarking all intersect, but it’s important for a thought vendor like me.

Here’s the problem: I have been using Delicious for years as a repository of shared ‘bookmarks’. I put the bookmarks term in quotes, because they are not really bookmarks: they aren’t dogeared pages or a slips of paper between pages of a book. They are just another sort of post that I create which have certain characteristics: they always have a URL that is being referenced, they often have a short commentary, and they generally have a few tags.

So, you might ask, what’s the problem?

The problem is that I also do very similar things in blog posts and my Twitter stream. And the three don’t come together anywhere, or at least not the way that I am starting to think they should. There is no tool that actually ignores the minute differences between tweets, posts, and bookmarks i na productive way.

Yes, I have set up Delicious to spit out my posts on a daily basis to my blog. (In fact, I have three Delicious accounts, one for each of my three www.stoweboyd.com blogs: see Pukka: A Bookmarklet For Multiple Delicious Accounts.) But those get posted the following day, which is way too slow for the bursty world of Twitter. There are various ways that I could post to Delicious and Twitter at same time, but that’s not exactly what I want, either.

I have also been using Bit.ly as a URL shortener, partly because it provides aggregation of references to the URL and stats about uptake. But that’s only part of the picture.

The perfect flow for me would be something like this:

1. I see something online that I want to comment on and retain. Perhaps it is within Twitter, or perhaps it is in the greater web somewhere. In either case, I would like to create a tweet with a shortened URL to the original reference, write a short comment, and add a tag or two.
2. I would like — as with Bit.ly — that the URL is managed so I can see later how much impact my comment has made, and to aggregate other commentary, posts, or bookmarks that flow from it.
3. I would also like that these comments could be parceled together on a daily basis, and posted to (one or more) of my blogs.
4. And I would like others to have access to the ‘bookmarks’ that I have made in this way.

My world today is a bit crude, but I am getting there:

1. Instead of posting to Delicious directly or through a Delicious bookmarklet, I am using Bit.ly’s bookmarklet to capture a post or a tweet to comment on. Bit.ly shortens the uRL and provides downstream aggregation and stats.
2. I have registered with Tweetmarks.com, which watches my Twitter stream. I have it configured so that if Tweetmarks sees a tweet with a URL and a hashtag, it will post it to my Delicious account. The downside is that it has no support for multiple Delicious accounts. (Perfect world would be designating various blogs by ‘+’ like the MT-Twitter plugin does. I could have ‘+m’ for /Message, ‘+g’ for /Ground and so on.)
3. Another downside is that Tweetnmarks seems to only accept one tag, and it pulls them out of the text, so you can’t have a tweet like ‘#tweetup has a small #bug — only takes the first #hastag www.bit.ly/7hFg’ because the ‘#tweetup’ is pulled out of the text and moved to a tag before being posted to Delicious.
4. Lastly, I still have Delicious posting bookmarks everyday.

Here’s a post from /Message, published this morning by the Delicious integration:

Bookmark Post, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

You can see that the top few bookmarks were created via Tweetmarks (not that they are tagged ‘tweetmarks’ by the tool), while the others were created directly via Delicious bookmarkleting (via Pukka).

The best solution going forward would be to cut out Delicious altogether. After all, all these different sorts of things are actually more similar than the divergence between the tools would suggest. However, to switch totally away from Delicious, I would need a new capabilities inside of a URL shortener like Bit.ly, providing various Delicious-like views based on the tags that I use. In essence, it would provide a personal and shared tagspace based on the tags I — and others — use in Twitter.

Solutions like hastags.org provide a shared tagspace, but not the personal tag experience that Delicious does. (One stopgap I am using is to favorite all the tweets I create that I turn into bookmarks, and repost to my blog.)

And, most importantly, since more an more of my blogging is being precipitated by activities in the faster tempo world of microstreaming, I want the new tagspace pointing to the posts in my blogs that reference the same tags or the same URLs.

The way I envision it now is that nearly everything starts as an insight, or a reply to something, or a short comment on something discovered: these short takes are perfectly suited to the Twitter stream and bit.lyish bookmarking I outlined. Them if later on I decide to expands something into a longer post, I would like to retain the relationship between the initial Tweet(s) and the post(s) that follow.

Various people are working on various new capabilities out there that might be taking me a lot closer to that vision in the next little while. More to follow.