Petting Party

Or “The perils of working in social media”

Don’t get me wrong, working in social media is great. Few people know what it’s *really* about, professionally, and it seems to be relatively untapped. Great! I’m employed and right now that is the best thing ever.

However, I find that being a professional blogger and social-networker leaves me with little motivation to update my personal social media outposts. Writing daily blog posts at work leaves me blogged out and the last thing I can think of upon getting home is writing an interesting blog!

I have a blog, a Myspace, a Twitter and a Facebook. (God, I would love to have a Flickr too but I fear that might fall by the wayside fairly quickly)

-My old blog I didn’t updated in oh so long. Then again, it was meant to be a place to keep all my published articles and seeing as how that hasn’t happened since I entered the world of digital marketing, I guess my words are kept elsewhere.
http://clevererthanyouraveragebear.blogspot.com

-My Twitter I updated for the first time in six months yesterday. Then again, as my friend Raff posted as his first ever Twitter update only days ago “raff is dandy after work and wishes someone he knew was on ere”. I don’t know anyone on Twitter and everything I read professes micro-blogging to be the future. Coming from a writing background this makes me sad. However, blates add me on Twitter.
http://twitter.com/rachaelwilliams

-My Myspace I have sorely neglected like an old friend who I think I can lose touch with for months on end but when we see each other it’ll all be fine and dandy. Such is not the case. Myspace has become a wasteland in my absence. It’s such an earnest, sweet network that I wish to keep my Myspace page shiny pretty and bestow it with regular blogs and pictures. Viva la revolucion.
http://www.myspace.com/rachsmell

-Facebook, strangely, doesn’t suffer from this apathy. I am as addicted to my own Facebook as I am to all my work FB accounts. Why is this? I think I quite like (not so secretly as I announced it on my status updates yesterday) grimacing at people’s poor spelling and grammar and random ugly people who tag my friends in pictures. Yes, FB is my own personal bottle-necking car-crash experience. I can sit behind my screen gaping at the (inner) lives of the dregs of society. Brill. Add me on Facebook so I can vicariously enjoy your life too.

Now to blogging. I think of blogging in 3 distinct types. The first you have is the most common one- the diary blog. It’s easy, and simple for people to formulate. It’s also the most self-indulgent and therefore generally the most boring. An exceptional example of the diary blog was that of American pornstar ChristianXXX. His hit blog ran for exactly one year, with a mammoth post every single day. I enjoyed reading it because it was so intimate and so personal in a very unblinking way. He laid out his life from working out, what he ate, to whom he fucked at work and their performance, and if you didn’t like it well that was your business not his. It would seem he lost and made a lot of friends as a result of his blog. Diary blogs are rarely interesting to others beyond the writer and his/her personal friends. You may argue that Christian’s blog is merely interesting because of his life in the adult industry, well I’d disagree. You’d only have to compare his blog to that of Digital Playground contract girl Stoya. I’m sorry Stoya, you might be hot, but you have yet to pique my obsessive blogging interest.
The second type of blog you get is a newsblog. They aren’t generally written by the average blogger admittedly, but I can’t exactly omit them from the list. I’m kinda lumping corporate blogs into this as well btw as they are essentially the news from within a company. Corporate blogs are proper smart these days though, and can be a genuinely enjoyable read. Check out my friend the TVXMole’s blog, as it’s really only about TVX but it’s still funny and interesting
http://tvxmole.wordpress.com
The third type of blog you get, is I guess, sorta what type this blog is. Essays, articles, thoughts of life and society, all that jazz come under this massive umbrella that I daren’t put a label on. My friend Anne Wollenberg is bloody ace at this. Lucky for her, The Guardian think so too. Check out her amazing blogs on their website.

More increasingly I’m convinced that hybrid blogs are the way forward. (please bear in mind I spend my working life on adult sites so the blogs that tend to come to mind first are, well, smutty ones okay) A perfect example of this is the wonder that is Club1985. The editor Scott Steele posts witty and self-deprecating posts that are newsworthy posts. In between all this he has employed hot pornstars to fill up the diary-esque blogging quota. Yes, these posts are filled with images of said hot starlet doing naughty things but it does mean that not one reader is bored.
By now I imagine that you, oh reader of mine, would have checked your FB status maybe twice (I know I have!) so I’ll cut to the chase.
Mags like Wired may be convinced that micro-blogging is the future but I for one, still enjoy a good old fashioned read. Therefore I will continue to scour the blog-o-sphere for my kicks alongside updating my Twitter a little bit more than twice a year. I suggest you do the same.

Filed under: porn, social media