Last week Meredith Farkas wrote The changing professional conversation.

Last Friday, Roy Tennant pointed and nodded at Meredith’s post when he wrote Farkas on the Changing Professional Conversation.

The upshot of all three posts is that the authors feel pulled in many different directions by all the social media sites where they are active. They feel it on the writer’s side, where they feel a lack of control over things they write and then post on sites that they don’t own. And Meredith and Roy also are feeling it on the reader’s side where they find it harder to recall and re-locate the things they saw on Twitter. Or was it Google+. Couldn’t have been Google Wave…

So. I don’t usually like to offer advice here. But I realized that I used to worry about this kind of thing and now I don’t so much. So here’s what I do, or what I would do if I were still more worried about this problem of fragmentation–your mileage may vary.

1. Blog more. If you have something kind of interesting to share, blog it. Don’t just slap it on Twitter and call it good. Let Twitter or Google+ or whatever be your first draft of your cool idea and the blog post be the second draft. If you want to link to someone else’s thing, take two minutes to write up a bit of context and blog it. You know you are just feeding your blog to all those social network sites anyway.

2. Blog less. Each post should be 25-75% shorter than you first thought it should be. I don’t think I have ever wished a post were 250 words longer.

3. Ignore almost everything. FriendFeed is my social network and professional network of choice. I  subscribe to about 20 blogs or other feeds that I’d call “professional.”

And I mostly ignore everything else. I have accounts on Twitter and Facebook and Jobs knows what else (Plurk? Hunch still sends me newsletters. Get a life, Hunch), but only because some people I care about are only active on those sites and it’s nice to check in on them sometimes.

You don’t have to worry about finding again that thing you saw on Google+ if you never go to Google+. Who are the five people in your professional network that really bring the good stuff time and again? Who is reading tons of blogs so you don’t have to? Follow those people, and forget the rest.

4. Keep everything else in one place forever.  Put all your eggs in one basket. My basket used to be del.icio.us. Anything I saw on the web that I thought I might ever want to see again for any reason, I tried to remember to bookmark in del.icio.us. Now I have switched to Evernote, which is more versatile in what kinds of eggs I can throw in the basket, and keeps a copy of the eggs on my computer.

You don’t have to ever look at most of those notes or links ever again. Don’t groom your folksonomy, don’t spend a moment wondering if you should keep a link or cull it. Keep it. Back it up. Space is cheap.

If it’s something that you can’t ignore (see 3, above), own it.

5. Don’t delete your accounts. Just trust me on this one. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. If you can’t stop fussing with it, get a friend to change the password or something.

That’s it. If you liked this post, you’ll like my new social media optimization handbook, Who Leads the Thought Leaders Thoughts, and my book of daily affirmations, The Clothes’ New Emperor.

I think most people know that feeling of needing to write something, to get it down on paper or encoded in magnetic media; to get it out of one’s head and into the world. Most people stop there, with a diary entry or maybe with a letter to a friend. People who self-publish have that same itch, but after we scratch it, we want to get those scratchings out where other people can feel them. Self-publishing has a bad rap because it is born out of an undeniably egocentric impulse: “I made this, and I feel the need to share it.” Self-publishing has a bad rap because self-publishers are too impatient or too naive or too confident in our wonderfulness to want to submit our work (to be submissive to?) a third-party publisher.

In the 1990s, I was lucky enough to stumble upon the flourishing zine culture. Zines–rhymes with “clean” as in “zine scene,” not with “brine” like “zines of the times”–are little magazines or pamphlets or comics or manifestos or god-knows-whats that are self-published, usually in small runs, usually not designed to make money, often produced on a photocopier. Zines fall in the Crafty Valley between the handmade and the mass-produced. Zines gave then, and give still today, a medium for people who are dissatisfied with the mass media. It’s no wonder that many zines come out of existing subcultures and countercultures such as punks, bicyclists, environmentalists, and other people who find themselves on the margins.

Just as desktop publishing and photocopiers made zines a viable form of self-expression for many thousands of people, the Web and blogs made the Internet the world’s largest self-publishing platform. “Blog” has become such a ubiquitous term that it may have lost some of the stigma of self-publishing that it once had. But I started See Also… partially in response to the ridiculous things that Michael Gorman had said about blogs and “blog people.” If a reactionary jackass like Gorman felt like his hegemony was threatened by bloggers, I wanted in on that action.

Self-publishing is rooted in ego, but its goal is community. For a self-publisher, a million readers isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A hundred readers. If you can get one hundred people reading your self-published zine, or your self-published blog, or your self-published music, or your stencil art, or your video project, and you can get some significant fraction of those hundred people to respond to you, to send you their pet project, to tell you what you mean to them, or that you are full of shit, or to set something up where you can meet face to face for a meal or a drink or to play music or trade publications, or whatever; if you can do that, that’s cool.

Science fiction writer John Scalzi posted this weekend a list of Yet Another 10 Things I’ve Done That You Probably Have Not. It’s a fun list, with items like “swatted a fly off Harrison Ford’s lapel” and “been in a car that crashed, in a not-quite-irony-free fashion, through a cemetery fence.” It’s a little heavy on the encounters with famous men for my taste, but “ingratiatingly self-aggrandizing” is part of Scalzi’s brand, so it works.

His first item on the list is what caught my eye, though: “1. Been a couple of feet away from a Shakespeare First Folio.” This is a bet he would have lost with me.

I was fortunate enough to work at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin when I was in library school. The job itself wasn’t all that glamorous, and mostly consisted of paging materials from the closed stacks to bring to the readers in the reading room. But even as a lowly page, one could say things like, “wait, which copy of the First Folio did he want? He knows we have two, right?”

So yes, I have been a couple of feet from a First Folio. I then closed the distance and picked it up and took it to the reading room. When the reader was done with it, I probably paged through it.

In that job, I held manuscripts hundreds of years older than the First Folio and 19th century “yellowback” popular novels far more rare than the First Folio. I held the first printed edition of Dante and the first book printed in English. I held manuscript pages written by D.H. Lawrence and Tom Stoppard and Tennessee Williams.

Which, you know, yay me. But yay you, too. If you work at a college or university, you likely have something brag-worthy in your special collections, too. Here at Colorado College we have 4,000-year-old clay tablets and a leaf of the Gutenberg Bible. We have a few dozen books printed before the year 1600 and dozens more artists books from the 20th century and beyond. So even if you don’t work at such a library, you can visit one. And the lovely thing about libraries is that books, as we say, are for use. For all but the rarest, most fragile and delicate things, you will be allowed to hold them, page through them, and even read them if you so desire.

So I encourage you to one-up John Scalzi. Find something in special collections to get up close and personal with.

In library blogland, the idea of charitable reading is mostly associated with my main man, Josh, who brought the idea over from the Forge, a role playing game discussion site. The original Forge post makes it clear that this is an issue of etiquitte and social norms–something that readers should do because it is fair to the writer and helps maintain the community. This is interesting and useful, but it always strikes me as odd when someone feels wronged by a response to their words and comes back with “I guess you just aren’t being a charitable reader.”

The more I think about it, the more I am sure that it isn’t up to the writer to demand to be read a certain way. What if, instead of looking at “charitable reading” as etiquitte, we instead thought of it as a philosophical or even spiritual practice? That we should read charitably, not for the writer’s sake, but for our own sake.

We should be charitable readers because such charity gives us a chance to see things from someone else’s point of view, to respond in a way that is constructive and generous instead of defensive or snarky. We should all practice charitable reading not because it makes our online communities more placid, but because it makes us better people. What if we thought of it less as an expansion on Wil Wheaton’s catchphrase “don’t be a dick,” and more as a subset of the Golden Rule?

The next time I feel wronged by a reader, I will try not to suggest that they need to read me charitably. Instead I will try to read and respond to my critic charitably .

(Unless they say something really obnoxious. Or leave themselves open for a really good wisecrack. I’m not made of stone.)

Of course I can’t help but think over how well I embody the practices and ideas that Jenica outlines. I’m reasonably happy with how I present myself online, though I recognize that sometimes I may go overboard in an attempt to make a joke or a point. But I made the bed, and I have to lie in it, and thus far it has been a very comfortable bed indeed.

One of the things we asked them to do last night was to participate in a very old internet meme. We had them read John Scalzi’s 15 Things About Me and Books and then post their own 15 things to the couse website.

I can’t show you their posts, but I thought I might as well show you mine:

1. I had a fight with my girlfriend in college when she borrowed a book from me (Romeo and Juliet, I believe) and returned it dog-eared.
2. I remember looking at the books on the spinning display in my elementary school library, especially ship on the cover of “The Voage of the Dawn Treader” and especially especially “The Dragon’s Handbook” which had green pages and which I checked out repeatedly.
3. The illustrations for the book “Pick a Peck of Puzzles” freaked me out so badly as a kid, I think I had to hide the book from myself.
4. Like Scalzi, I burned a class text once (“David Copperfield.”) Unlike Scalzi, I don’t feel too bad about it.
5. I used to read books on my Palm Pilot while walking to CC from home.
6. I watched a co-worker steal a book when I was still a pretty new employee at Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore. He advised me “when you have your review with a manager and they ask what you like about working here, don’t say ‘free books.’”
7. I’m not usually someone who says he likes the smell of books, but I recall the smell of a Latin Bible printed by Nicolas Jenson on vellum in 1476 which I thought was the most beautiful book at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.
8. I’m not much of a book collector, but I have a small collection of career books for girls about being a librarian.
9. I bought a copy of Plato’s Dialogues at a library sale when I was in elementary school. I didn’t know a thing about Plato, and never really read any of it, but I liked the fact that it looked old and had a green leather spine.
10. I wish we had a better term than “graphic novel” for big, thick, “respectable” comics. Very few of them are novels. I love all kinds of comics.
11. My Northwestern University roommate and I checked out all the books by journalist/memoirist/kinda hokey guy/Northwestern alumnus Bob Greene in the NU library, and my roommate took them to a signing where a puzzled Greene inscribed them.
12. My first full-time library job was in interlibrary loan at the University of Delaware library. I used to have a file with photocopies of the covers or title pages of the strangest books that passed through my hands there. I can’t find it, but a few I remember are: “My Life With the Microbes”; “Atlas of Avoidable Death”; “Crimson Steel” which had a disclaimer on the back cover releasing the publisher from responsibility if you injured yourself while even just reading the book.
13. Buying books every quarter was probably my favorite part of college.
14. I once gave the OK to discard an old reference set that was a German etymological dictionary of French. A few months later I got an email from Owen Cramer: “I can’t find Wartburg anywhere. What have we done!”
15. I have two sons, ages 4 and 7. I was talking to them about our class over dinner tonight and asked them if the audio books they liked to listen to are “books” or not. Mr. 4 said yes, because someone is reading the book to you. Mr. 7 said no, because first, they aren’t really reading to you, and second a recording of someone reading a book is not also a book. I agree with them both.

Anyway.

The guy lost his job recently, which prompted his newest scheme: The Jason Scott Sabbatical. The idea is that if he can raise $25,000 in donations, he can devote himself to his myriad projects in computer history. People like you and me pledge money. If he hits $25K in pledges by 22 November 2009, the pledges will automatically be paid out of pledger’s Amazon accounts, Jason gets a pile of money, pledgers get various premiums based on how much we pledged, and Jason keeps us updated on how he’s spending his time and our money. If he fails to meet the goal, nothing happens.

I pledged $25, the minimum suggested pledge (though you could pledge as little as $5.00). I want to see this succeed for him. I’m also very intrigued at how Kickstarter works. It could have been a good way to do the Louisville Free Public Library fundraiser. It could be a way to do a project like the LSW Zine (more on that very soon) and ensure it gets entirely funded before making a single photocopy. It could be a way for a library to run a fundraiser for a specific project. It looks elegant and fun.

I doubt many of you will want to pledge to the Jason Scott Sabbatical if you aren’t familiar with him, but if you are, then please consider pledging. And if you aren’t familiar with him, why not?

Also, if you have any experience with Kickstarter or have other interesting Kickstarter projects you’d like to point me to, please leave a comment.

Things have changed over those years, which seem simultaneously like a long time and a blink of an eye. The tone and purpose of this blog would seem to have changed a few times. I’m posting less often, but more convinced than ever that I need this “home base” on the web.

As always, my thanks to those of you who still read See Also… regularly. And for those of you who have gone from being readers and fellow bloggers to being professional contacts, dear friends, and co-conspirators, I am profoundly grateful.

Edited at 3:50 MDT: Clinical Reader has changed their site, and blamed the legal threat on a junior employee. I think the only thing missing is a brief public apology to Nikki. The below is still an interesting case study on how overreacting in social media can come back to bite you very quickly.

Original post:

The great and terrible thing about Twitter is the way it makes it so easy for an organization to shoot itself in the foot. About an hour ago, I had never heard of Clinical Reader. Now, I would never use, trust or recommend them, and am happy to share my opinion with you, dear reader.

And it’s not because of what Nikki Dettmar wrote on her Eagle Dawg Blog entry, Starry ethics fail about how Clinical Reader seems to be misrepresenting themselves as recipients of awards and recommendations that don’t exist. I might not have even seen that post, and if I did, I might have been inclined to give Clinical Reader the benefit of the doubt and assumed it was a minor lapse in judgement that they would soon rectify. Hanlon’s Razor and all that.

But when they respond to that blog post not with an apology or explanation (or even silence), but with bogus legal threats, they immedately move from the “possibly clueless” category in my brain to the “toxic and dangerous” category. (Also: love the “too” and the way they say they are “kindly” threatening someone. I feel warm and fuzzy.) And I’m not the only one.

Way to shut up your critics, Clinical Reader.

Edited at 2:02 MDT: It just gets better! Quit while you are behind, Clinical Reader!