Thinking out loud

Back in April I blogged about how I wasn't sure what I was going to do with this humble little blog (see here), and not much has changed since.  Here I muse out loud about the future of Freedom to Differ:

I would, however, be interested in your thoughts and suggestions.  Leave a comment below and/or tweet me @PeterBlackQUT.

(Sorry for yet another self indulgent blog post.  I'm sure you are getting sick of them by now.)

Comments

[Suzi]

I loved your blog. I like the group idea for Freedom to Differ. I'd be happy to do media-related updates for it?
Don't shut it down all together, keep it there. But that combined site for 'silly and serious' Pete ramblings would be good.
I'm not down with Twitter, I think you've got too much to say to just twitter, which is often just postings links.
Anyway, that's my two cents....as I too sit here on a Saturday night. Ha ha. (I love X-factor too much)

[David Harrison]

In all honesty, I haven't listened to one of the audio blog post things. I really enjoy reading this blog; the comments on technology from a legal perspective are fascinating to me personally and hugely relevant to my work. But I can't absorb information from podcasts/audio as fast as I can read it, so I tend to pretty much never listen to them. Including this one, so this post might be utterly useless as feedback (in which case, apologies).

[Cathy Crawford]

Dont give up the blog PB.

[Pete Black]

Thanks CC - I don't think I'll give it up totally.

[Pete Black]

Thanks Suzi - I don't think I could shut it down. I just need to come up with a way to aggregate all of my internet activity on one site. It used to be this blog, but now all of my activity is scattered between Twitter, Google Reader, Audioboo, this blog, Freedom to Dither etc etc ...

And I would be more than happy to add you as an author if you would like to post media-related updates. Do you know of anyone else who might like to contribute?

[Pete Black]

Thanks for the feedback David - I really do appreciate it.
I take your point but the flip side, of course, is that it takes me more time to write posts, whereas posting a quick Audioboo with my iPhone takes almost no time at all.
I'm still struggling, I guess, to find the right balance.

[David Harrison]

Yep, totally understand; I've done my share of writing and appreciate how much effort goes into it.

If you wanted to go nuts and spend a bit of money you could possibly use a service like Amazon's Mechanical Turk to find people to transcribe the audio into a written version (I've never tried that but I've read a few reports from people that have used it successfully) - that way you'd easily be able to provide both.

[Paul Mackenroth]

I think you would find that if you created a facebook page for freedom to differ you might get the same outlet but with increased patronage. The hardest part of maintaining interest in blogs such as yours is that people tend to migrate to the place where their freinds use or are most popular. I may be wrong but I think that would be facebook. If you created a page called Freedom to Differ it would let people access your posts (maybe not as comprehensive as on your blog) and at the same time avoid people having to check multiple sites. Hope my random thoughts help!