My Sprawling Digital Empire, Where to Find Me Online and My Friending Policy

July 15, 2008 · by · in Blogosphere Issues, Life as a Law Professor

Recently, I have proliferated the online venues where I am publishing content. This blog post enumerates all of the various places I hang out online:

Technology & Marketing Law Blog. This is my main ongoing publication outlet. I try to post there about 15-20 times a month.

Goldman’s Observations. Since you’re here, you already know about this one! I post here when I have something to say that doesn’t fit into the Technology & Marketing Law Blog. Typically, that’s around 8-10 times a month.

Personal Website. I use this for archival storage and navigation-driven retrieval. Often, when I post something online there, I will blog about its availability. There’s no other easy way to find out when new content is added there.

Epinions.com. I don’t write new product reviews often. When I do, I will often double-post them here or at least post a link to the new review. I also occasionally post to TripAdvisor–same deal about cross-posting.

SSRN. SSRN always has the “canonical” and “final” version of my academic articles. I will always blog about a new SSRN posting.

InformIT. I occasionally publish articles there. Sometimes they are reposted to the blog.

Twitter. I’ve launched a Twitter account but I still don’t know what to do with it.

Facebook and LinkedIn. If we’re not already friends, send me an invitation (but see my friending policy below). Like Twitter, I’m still trying to figure out what to do with these sites. I probably still have accounts at Friendster and Orkut, but I haven’t been to either site in ages.

My slinky store. I used Zlio to put together a slinky store. It’s not been successful, but part of the problem is that Zlio doesn’t carry enough slinky items to make a unique store.

YouTube. I launched a YouTube channel to post my Alaska videos. My wife’s YouTube channel is a better source of videos of the kids.

Picture Sites. I’ve posted pictures both to Kodak Gallery and Flickr (co-opting my wife’s Yahoo account).

Chat. I use AOL’s IM (which very few people seem to use any more–email me if you want my IM screen name) and Gmail’s Chat.

Others. I’m sure I have other digital hangouts, but if they didn’t make this list, I’m probably not investing very much in them.

My Friending Policy

I’m pretty liberal about accepting friend invitations at Facebook and LinkedIn. However, there are two main reasons why I might decline or ignore a friend invitation:

1) If we have never met face-to-face, I may not accept your invitation. I’ve made a lot of friends through my online activities, and FTF isn’t a prerequisite to friendship in my book. However, over my 3.5 years of blogging, I’ve found that eventually I cross paths with my virtual friends in physical space for some reason or another. I do have some Facebook and LinkedIn friends who I’ve never met, but that’s a pretty small group.

2) If I don’t recognize your name, then I probably won’t accept your invitation. This doesn’t mean that we won’t become friends in the future, but we’ll probably have to get to know each other first before I am ready to close the loop on a social networking site.

Just like my blogroll, I occasionally purge my friends list.