Belshaw's public Facebook page

As anybody who follows the blog will have gathered, I'm fairly active in the on-line world. In doing so, I work across multiple platforms. I also follow on-line developments reasonably closely, including shifts between platforms, as well as my role on each platform.

My approach to the on-line world is not always as structured as it should be. It becomes difficult to balance and indeed keep up to date my various on-line presences from the blogs through Linked in, Twitter, Panoramio, sribd, my personal Facebook page and many others. Some don't get updates, and just hang there in the internet world a bit like bad smells. So I have been looking at rationalising, taking into account the strengths of various platforms.

Take Twitter as an example. Here I follow 81 people, are followed by 146 including a number of media outlets, have tweeted 2,454 times. I find it a useful vehicle, especially as a source of stories. However, increasingly Twitter is dominated by what we might think of as conversational tweets. This is a problem for me.

At the moment, I don't have access to Twitter during the day, it's blocked by the firewalls, so I can't participate actively in the way required to build followers and traffic. I also find the tweet limit frustrating, especially in conversation. I have watched Twitter suck people in, detracting from other writing that I value more.

Or consider Facebook. My Facebook personal page is just that, a personal page. I do put some posts up, for example, but I am cautious in so doing. Others are more open. One of our blogging friends has 730 friends; she uses Facebook as a semi-public platform. I don't object to that, indeed I enjoy her Facebook posts. Yet it's not what I want to do. On Facebook, I want to present some broader stuff, but find some discomfort in juggling what I perceive to be a conflict between the personal and the more professional. I am more comfortable keeping my Facebook posts to the personal,

My friends span the political spectrum from well to the left to well on the right, to use those ideological cliches. I have also noticed that they have a not unreasonable tendency to assume that their friendship network shares their views! My public writing crosses ideological divides. On a personal basis, I don't especially want to get caught in political debates, although I sometimes suffer from the unworthy desire to hit like on some posts just I know that the posts would infuriate other of my friends!

All this is a long winded way of saying that I have established a public Facebook page as a single access point for some of my writing and short comments. Why Facebook? It's simply a better platform at this stage than the alternatives. That's all.

If you would like to find out more and have access to Facebook, simply click on this link, Facebook page. On a selfish note, I need 30 likes to get access to stats on visits. Do feel free to visit and click on like!