Nothing to see here! (aka The Blog Of Nothing)

Is it possible to be passionate about blogging without actually doing it?

When I’m nowhere near this thing, all manner of great ideas flood through my brain like an almighty, unstoppable stream of consciousness. Yet when I decide to actually put thought to keyboard….nothing.

My interests are many and varied but I seem to lack enough focus to either concentrate on one subject entirely or to concentrate on several and make the movement from one area to another seem natural and seamless. (Blimey, that’s a long sentence! Read it back twice and it seems to work though).

Even in the process of this very entry I have almost come to a crashing halt. I’ve got no idea where I’m heading or where I want to end up and yet still I plough on with no sense of what awaits me. A bit like life I suppose. And in that sense I carry on with the belief that sooner or later things will start to come into focus and more definitive action can be made and……..oh, dammit, lost my train of thought again. Until next time – whenever that may be – JW

Edit: only noticed after publishing this entry that its a year to the day since my last entry.

Here we go again…..(or aka Facebook v Twitter v Google+)

After four months I’ve finally returned to this blog. After starting out with the idea of being a totally F1 based blog, I’ve decided to widen it’s scope and allow myself to write about a wide range of subjects as divers as: f1, football, photography, books, television, films, orangutans and anything else that comes to mind.

To start with I thought I would revisit something I originally posted on Google+ last year comparing the merits of Facebook v Twitter v Google+. At the time I was totally new to Google+, had not long been with Twitter but was a long term user of Facebook. A year on, I probably spend more time on Twitter than Facebook and I have more or less abandoned Google+ completely.

So, from 25th August 2011 here is Facebook v Twitter v Google+ :

“So I’ve now had several weeks running Twitter, Facebook and Google+ together. Several weeks of trying work to out which ones best, which ones the future and which one doesn’t leave me staring at the screen trying to workout what I want to do and how I’m going to do it. Now I think I’m finally beginning to draw some conclusions. For me anyway, maybe not anyone else.

The modus operandi of Google+ has seemed to me to have been that this is the next big thing, that this is the thing that is going to revolutionise social media. Only – and I know this is still extremely early days – I don’t think it will. At best I think it may evolutionise social media,in that I feel most likely it will drag Facebook and Twitter along with it rather than kill them off. Now this may not have been Googles plan, but this must only be a good thing. After all, competition is good. It motivates everyone to improve their product, to provide flair and originality which is unique to themselves, to give people a reason to go on using them. It’s these unique aspects which have been swirling round in my mind and brought me to realise that there is no great winner in the social media smackdown. There may be in years to come, although but what definition and whose terms, who knows.

For me it’s beginning to pan out like this, maybe for other people too, but Facebook is very much about my family and friends. It’s a way to keep in touch, to still feel like we are all in each others lives even if geographically we are separated by several miles or even several continents. We don’t have to enter any big conversation, but we can leave a short comment there or a quick “like” there just to let our nearest and dearest know we are thinking of them, that we are still here and still care.

Twitter on the other hand isn’t really about my friends and family at all. Of the 26 people who follow me – yeah I know, not a lot – only 3 of them are family or friends. These same three people are the only family and friends I follow out of 92. Twitter for me is really about communicating to other like minded individuals around the world, people who have the same interests and likes as me but who I’ve never met and probably never will. Yes, there is also the “interaction” with famous people but that is only if you’re lucky enough to get a reply. In my case, I have no idea how many Tweets I’ve sent to famous people, but I can tell you how many replies I’ve received. One. And technically that was actually a DM which I didn’t even know I had until three days later. Slightly more frivolously, beyond just communication, Twitter’s also gotten me stuff that neither Facebook or Google+ have. It may not be much but so far I’ve won a couple of competitions and also managed to acquire an invitation to the final item on my agenda….. Google+.

From the start it has come across as the lovechild of Facebook and Twitter. Seemingly taking the best and most useful functionality of those two, putting them together and making something new. Only at first I wasn’t entirely sure what that new thing was. After all I was keeping in touch with family and friends on Facebook. Up until a few days ago I had no family and friends on Google+. Now I have just 1. So Google+ was going to be no help to me there. On Twitter I am able to comment on different subjects that interest me, often as they happen and sometimes directly with other people. I am able to follow comments from people involved in those events, be it in sports, news or publications. So far on Google+ there seems to be very little presence in that way. However, what does seem to be possible on Google+ is to use it as a platform for the sharing of ideas with many different people. It provides the ability to express thoughts that you just cannot manage to do in 140 characters on Twitter and that may not necessarily be of interest to your family and friends on Facebook. Here you can express your thoughts and ideas with the knowledge that there is a good chance there is someone out there who is interested.

So for now it looks like there is a big three-way socialmedia tie. Google+ isn’t ‘instead of’ or ‘better than’, it’s ‘as well as’. “