Academic Aesthetic 150

So, here I am two weeks into the new year and I've yet to get started on my new year's resolution. I thought I was getting ahead of the game by writing up some podcast scripts after Christmas, but now they seem kind of dated and, well, I can't find them.

Oh, well.

All things considered I have been quite busy. Those who follow my Twitter and Pownce accounts may have noticed I post almost nothing on the weekends - and with the exception of my planning days were I'm constantly in front of my computer to fill out all sorts of paperwork, a lack of postings means I have a lot on my plate.

But enough of that before this turns into an "Oh, I have too much to do, I shouldn't even be recording this right now!" podcast.

What?

It's too late for that?

Feh. Moving on, I'm really liking Pownce. For those of you not in the know, Pownce is very much like Twitter in that it's a micro-blog format. Both are designed to share small messages, links, and so on with others. Pownce goes further in regards to media sharing and organizing your friend lists. You can actually put, say, all of your friends who are art teachers into one group, math teachers in another, science teachers in another, family in another, and so on, and send links and messages only to those groups that would be interested in that subject.

I'm sure my sister, for example, doesn't really care about the highlights of last week's faculty meeting. This way, she wouldn't see it.

Now Twitter's still in the running. The tools for embedding Twitter into web pages seem more robust than the ones for Pownce, and if you're a text messaging fanatic Twitter will win hands down.

But for how I use it, I like Pownce a lot more. I loved it when I first got an invite to sign up, and I was reminded of how much I liked it a couple weekends ago when a huge chunk of the edublogosphere tried it out for a day at Steve Dembo's request.

Alas, the following week most of them were all back on Twitter. A social network can have all the features in the world, but it's still nothing without a critical mass of members. Twitter has that, and except for an all-too-brief moment, Pownce doesn't.

There are solutions, of course. Apps and websites that post to multiple networks, services that will pull RSS feeds into Twitter, but I'm not happy with the apps and I've already gotten complaints about my Pounce messages being cut short when they're cross posted to Twitter.

I'm still holding out for more people to make the switch to Pownce, but I know that, just like last time, before long I'm going to end up staying where more of my network is rather than continue talking to an (almost) empty space. Social networks are sticky that way.