2015 was a quiet year for me out in social media land. Gone were the days when geeks with RSS aggregators could be more popular than jocks with media teams. Social media had become mainstream and the noise from the ‘short head’ drowned out the beautiful stories from the ‘long tail’.
As the walled gardens of facebook and twitter grew ever more insular, the value of my online networks dwindled. RSS was no longer the glue that kept many small pieces loosely joined. My interest and activity online began to wane in 2014.
Two funny things happened in 2015:
- I started working as a public servant and made a conscious decision to stop blogging and tweeting out of fear of some policy breach or other by leaking sensitive public sector information.
- I discovered a group of public servants at gov.au who share my passion for improving the interactions between government and citizens through well designed digital services.
So having lost my voice online out of fear of doing the wrong thing, I decided to find it again in order to do the right thing. And I thought it would be interesting to review my online activity since I started blogging (for the purpose of podcasting) back in 2005.
Here is a table of the number of blog posts, facebook status updates and tweets per year:
And in pictures:
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In a little more detail:
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Let’s see what 2016 brings…
Well, seeing as how we work for the same “man” in same field now our stories are more prone to overlap… yet the connection hasn’t… must be something in there yet to be fathomed around “discovery networks” in the quiet, long, tail..
Good on you Mike. I thought you had gone a little quiet. I think any group, PS or otherwise, that aims to do better with us taxpayers is worthy of support. Plus, you have gems to share! Communicate on!!
Thanks Dave and Roy – good to know there are still some jewels out there in the LongTail.