The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 - 1962)

It’s been a little while since I’ve returned to this series, but with a few minutes to spare I thought I’d continue on refactoring your digital life.  To recap, the steps so far are:

Step 1: Get a better browser

Step 2: Explore your mail hosts options and consolidate your mail into fewer accounts

Step 3: Update your blog software and template

Step 4: Be consistent and be you!

Step 5: Evolve your digital life

Step 6: Interoperate and connect

What does all this mean? Well if you can’t be bothered re-reading all the posts, my steps towards digital re-factoring are essentially around updating your tools and your on-line identity.  Put yourself out there with your best foot forward and don’t be afraid to be you and use the best available tools to make your life easy.

At this point, much of what I’ve been suggesting has been internally focussed on streamlining your own identity and resources.  With this in place, you’re now ready for step 7; reach out and connect to new people.

There is no easy answer to the question “How do I build my online network?”.  Ultimately you need to figure out what works for you; still I have a few tips that you can explore.

1. Join Twitter, then use Twitter search.  Twitter is an micr-blogging service which is a little confusing until you get the hang of it.  If you’re new to Twitter, I recommend that you set-up your account, download Twhirl (a good Twitter client that makes it a bit easier for a newbie user to get their head around Twitter) and start following people.  If you don’t know who to follow, then use the twitter search to look for things your interested in, then start joining the conversation; before you know it you’re part of a bigger community and participating in ongoing conversations.
2. Use a service like Technorati to find other bloggers who are writing about things you’re interested in.  This can be a challenge (because you’ll be hit by a flood of content) but find a few interesting bloggers and again, join in the conversation by commenting on their blog and providing links back to your own.

Let me know how you’re steps towards re-factoring your own digitial life are going and if there is anything in here of interest.

Oh what a tangled web we weave… - Sir Walter Scott

Ok, so perhaps I’m not practicing to decieve (the full quote is “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to decieve”), but still, the web is tangled regardless.

I posted on Why Enterprises are Sucker-punched by Web2.0 earlier which got me thinking about what the complexity and interaction on the web really looks like so I thought I’d further illustrate that the web is an eco-system by trying to map out my own little corner of the web.  This brings me nicely on to the next topic of my re-factor your digital life series which is to Interoperate.

But first, here is my little eco-system:

As you can see, it’s a tangled web indeed. This is really only what I consider my core on-line presence, I haven’t really included other services that I don’t use (Plaxo), are incidental in nature only (Feedjit), I still intend to get rid of (Jaiku), or are more personal in nature (for example Dopplr also links to my family blog).  I also haven’t shown the series of feeds etc. that keep me on top of what’s going on.

The coloured dots represent the direct inputs into the system, either mobile, through a PC client or via the Web.

The dotted lines show the various automated data feeds between the systems.

The solid lines show the direct links and click-throughs.

A few comments on all of this:

• The hub of my presence is now this blog.  All relevant services feed into and can be reached from this blog.  I’ve tried to close the loop.  It’s paying off, a contact from IBM commented today he had seen the blog because he linked to it when we connected on LinkedIn.
• Actually it’s not as complex as it looks in some respects because much of the networking below the interface layer is now self tending and it’s actually contextual in terms of time and place at the input layer.

Of course, the choice of services is not as random as it might appear.  I’ve been putting a bit of thought into the core services I want to use and why.

• Wordpress (binaryplex.com) - Drives this blog and is very customisable to let me link in my other on-line presences in a nice, clean template.  This blog represents to some degree what I am thinking about and exploring where I can share and learn from others.
• Twitter - I use Twitter because it keeps many of my profiles “fresh”, for example, even if I don’t post daily, the Flash badge on BinaryPlex let’s you know I’m still around.  TwitterFeed promotes my blog entries in Twitter to those contacts, while TwitterSync means that my FaceBook status is always fresh and up to date.  I’m also learning lots and making connections with Twitter (especially since I discovered Summize which lets me discover people and conversations I might be interested in).
• Dopplr - My main purpose for blogging and my on-line presence is ultimately to connect with people around ideas.  Dopplr gives me the opportunity to take this one step further and potentially lead into the physical space as well.
• LinkedIn - People’s mileage on LinkedIn will vary, but for me, it’s a better address book, which has the advantage that you update your contact details without me needing to keep track of you.  With many sites adding LinkedIn support it’s a nice way to get set up with new sites and quickly find friends you want to invite or who already use a service and you connect to.  Finally, it’s the other half of my on-line presence - if Binaryplex.com is what I’m thinking and doing, then LinkedIn is a more professional, consolidated record of what I’ve done.
• Del.icio.us - I could use Ma.gnolia.com, I’m used to del.icio.us, it does what I need and others I work with use it too.  My challenge on the social bookmarking front is that with a trial of an internal bookmark service in DogEar now, I’m struggling to figure out how to manage both services — I want my bookmarks external, but I recognise the value internally for people who won’t use a service like del.icio.us.
• Facebook - Actually I don’t really use Facebook much at all anymore, I got sick of the spam and generally speaking the people I want to connect with on a more serious level aren’t on there anyway.  With TwitterSync, my Facebook friends get a live update on me and what I’m up to, I’ve turned down all the notifications and I go on-line occasionally to connect socially with some of the people that I don’t find in other spheres.

So that’s step 6, inter-operate, plug and connect to make a more streamlined, connected on-line presence.

Step 1: Get a better browser

Step 2: Explore your mail hosts options and consolidate your mail into fewer accounts

Step 3: Update your blog software and template

Step 4: Be consistent and be you!

Step 5: Evolve your digital life

Step 6: Interoperate and connect

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection — Charles Darwin

Survival of the fittest - evolve, weed out and select your on-line services with vigour and rigour. Try them but if they don’t work, ditch them.  If you want to preserve the weak, then invest the time to upgrade them to today (I say this after having spent the better part of 4 hours taking old manually crafted HTML from an early web-site and merging it into my personal blog on Saturday).

It doesn’t need to be hard, search for what you are trying to do and typically someone has done it (import Blogger into WordPress; it’s simple there is a built in Import function in Wordpress itself for this!).

The message here is in two simple parts:

1. Always try new things.
2. Don’t be afraid to throw the new things (or the old ones) that don’t work out, or bring them up to spec if you want to keep them.

The web is a vast eco-system of natural selection, the best services will evolve and the others will, over-time, wilt, die or more likely be consolidated into bigger and bigger social service companies (e.g. Google, Microsoft, IBM etc.).

Step 5 in re-factoring your digital life:

Step 1: Get a better browser

Step 2: Explore your mail hosts options and consolidate your mail into fewer accounts

Step 3: Update your blog software and template

Step 4: Be consistent and be you!

Step 5: Evolve your digital life

Reputation is character minus what you’ve been caught doing — Michael Iapoce

On-line you can be who you want to be, however I think most regular bloggers will agree that reputations are built and enhanced by interacting with people who aren’t afraid to be themselves, rather than hiding behind a persona.  Of course, over time we accumulate baggage that doesn’t represent us fully now.

When I started blogging, I was more protective of who I am, but over time I’ve appeared in so many places that identifying and tracking back the real me isn’t actually that hard.  This leads to an inconsistency.

I’ve also experimented with several blogs over the years and under some pseudonyms that I’d rather weren’t attributed back to me (personally I think that there was a positive message in my LazyLeaders blog, but at first glance, which might be all you get if someone is looking to employ you, the title isn’t really that flattering).

To achieve this, I’ve been slowly doing several things:

1. Linking the value sites together - LinkedIn takes you to this blog, this blog takes you to LinkedIn and Twitter, Twitter will bring you back here.
2. Deleting accounts that I no longer need or use.  Nothing wrong with them, but I’m trying to centralise and consolidate my identity on line (goodby Jaiku).
3. Deleting old blogs where I just don’t need them.
4. I’m claiming my identity (http://claimid.com) which will also give me an OpenID.

So here it is, Step 4 in re-factoring your digital life:

Step 1: Get a better browser

Step 2: Explore your mail hosts options and consolidate your mail into fewer accounts

Step 3: Update your blog software and template

Step 4: Be consistent and be you!

This one is short and sweet.

Update your blog software AND template. Do it. Do it now.  And if you use a hosted platform like Blogger, laugh out loud at those of us who don’t but need to keep this step in mind.

I’ve been using my favourite template since I downloaded it probably more than two years ago (which is not the same time I started blogging with it, that came later).  I’ve always updated with each Wordpress release, but I’ve never upgraded the template until last week.  What I had never really paid much attention too, was that some of the new features required new templates to take advantage of them.

All that hacking PHP to add in support for various things you want to link in to your blog? Not any more with the text widget.

It’s also a great opportunity to revisit your template and ask if it’s really representing you properly now?

So step 3 is simple, update your blog platform AND your templates on a regular basis.  You’re digital life will be made that much easier (and secure) because of this simple step.

Step 1: Get a better browser

Step 2: Explore your mail hosts options and consolidate your mail into fewer accounts

Step 3: Update your blog software and template

Time to deal with that pesky e-mail.  Actually this is one that I *mostly* have under control, but I think there are a couple of valuable tips.  Depending on how you approach your e-mail, your mileage will vary.

Broadly, there are four different types of e-mail you can have:

1. Corporate e-mail address.  Most people will have at least one of these.
2. ISP e-mail address. Most of us will have one of these too.
3. Web Mail address (Hotmail, Google Mail etc.), also very common!
4. Your own domain mail address.

There are a myriad of options, but for my money, mail re-directors are the key.  This is going to be different for each provider, but roughly speaking, most mail hosts provide you the ability to automatically forward your mail to other accounts.  In some cases (typically web-mail) you can’t always forward, but you can consolidate multiple accounts in to one.

Again you’re own choices will vary, but my choices are as follows:

1. Corporate mail - I can’t do much with this, so I like to have every thing come here.  You may not want to answer your mail from here, but it’s nice to know you’ve got it during the day.
2. ISP - I’ve re-directed my ISP mail address (which typically only receives mail from my ISP) to my own domain address.
3. Web mail — I dispensed with these a long time ago, although there are reasons why I wouldn’t mind one.  The major issue is that personal mail I recieve in my corporate mail account is branded as my company when it goes back out.  This generally doesn’t bother me, but it may not always be appropriate.  Web mail account would help me here, but I want one branded with my domain name (I think I can do this, but it needs some play time and signing up with GMail or Hotmail to try it out….).
4. Domain Mail — All other mail, including multiple mail addresses on the binaryplex.com domain are eventually forwarded to one mail box, and this is copied off to my corporate address.  This means I am notified when I get mail, but can access my mail from home later and be branded as binaryplex.com when I want to deal with it.

Ultimately a Domain Mail account with a web host is really powerful and lets you do lots of neat things.  I like to have the ability to setup my own e-mail addresses and do so on occasion for web sites that I don’t trust for various reasons.  I can then just delete the mail account when I need to.

So here is the newest step in re-factoring your digital life:

Step 1: Get a better browser

Step 2: Explore your mail hosts options and consolidate your mail into fewer accounts

There are many places one can begin, but for me the first step in the journey is my internet browser. For various reasons (not least because we still use it at work) I’ve stuck with IE6. I played with version 1 of Firefox, but the performance was terrible and it used to lock up on me all the time, so I never went back.

Step 1 in re-factoring my life is getting a latest release browser. To that end I’m (as much as possible) using Firefox V3 (currently RC1). Where RC1 doesn’t work, I’m falling back to Firefox 2. Why? Well beyond the obvious things like tabs etc., when compared to IE6:

1. It’s faster! That’s right, browsers like all applications improve in speed and memory usage with each release. Unlike the olden days of the internet, where processing all happened on the server, now a lot of the underlying technologies that deliver that Web 2.0 experience happen on your PC client. A fast browser makes for a better experience.
2. Plug-in support and extensibility. If you’re on IE6 still and use del.icio.us, try this one simple step. Download Firefox 2, and install the del.icio.us bookmark tools. Game over IE6.
3. A lot of the new release software I’m working with is written by developers who use Firefox. I shouldn’t forget our users who are stuck with IE6 for various reasons, BUT particularly with beta software, I get a better first look experience with Firefox.
4. I hadn’t realised until I started using Firefox V2+ again, how many sites now don’t render properly in IE6. When you’re writing a consumer focussed application, support for IE7+ and Firefox2+ is the minimum it seems. If you’re looking at this site (http://binaryplex.com), it doesn’t render properly for IE6 — you have to use Firefox2 or IE7 to get the proper experience.

So here it is, step one for re-factoring your life:

Step 1: Get a better browser

You’ll see a few changes across the board in the next week or two as I gradually re-factor my digital life.  What’s this mean?  Well I have 4 blogs, 4 active e-mail addresses (other inactive ones), three web hosts (only one I remember the password to and it’s broken), 1 old http site archived on disk, more social network accounts than I can track, e-mail spam from sites I don’t read, feeds from sites I do and generally a fractured on-line identity that has evolved as the internet has evolved.

I’m going to be actively stream-lining all this activity to centralise it into services that I do use, where you can come to get the latest.  I’m going to actively shut-down accounts I don’t use (Jaiku) and make more prominent services I am using (Twitter and LinkedIn).

I’ve already created an OpenID account (yes, I’m slow) and I’m setting BinaryPlex as a delegator of my OpenID to http://claimid.com.  In light of this I’m going to actively re-consider my use of sites like http://del.icio.us (which doesn’t support OpenID) and consider http://ma.gnolia.com instead which does.

The end aim will be a new, streamlined, re-factored Internet me, that is updated to take advantage of the latest trends.  I think it’s an essential piece of housekeeping that everyone should do!

To that end, I’ve reluctantly retired the old green BinaryPlex format for a much more up to date, 2-column, widget and WordPress 2.5.x compatible theme.  I hope it grows on me, I have been very attached to the greenery one :-).  The 2-columns will become more important as I intend to feed more meta information into this site than I have in the past.

As I conduct each step, I’ll blog about why I’ve made the moves I have and what I see the advantages are. Maybe some of you will join me on this adventure and I hope to take small steps towards catching up with those others of you who have passed me by while my digital identity has been standing still over the last 12 - 18 months.