Re-Blogging Social Media Brain Farts

The Teeth Maestro blog has been online for over 10 years, since July 2004, back in the day when Blogging was considered a fad and called citizen journalism and not social media perse, from its infancy, many saw it grow, from the era of Orkut to Blogspot, the era of Google, to Facebook and then cometh the crashing the sensational micro-blogging site called Twitter. All technologies have been a rude awakening for each passing trend, each technology struggled to present to the vibrant youthful generation hungry to share nuggets of their “brainfarts” to an awaiting audience of millions, whosoever presented the right exposure usually captivated the content producers for sometime to come – but ironically this new generation has a very short term memory, and quite literally an hour later this young content producer truly and totally forgets his previous brainfart to move onto a new one, hence no need to search or the need to walk down memory lane of what he/she may have said a month back.

Social Media Brain Farts: Sporadic bursts of Social Media regurgitationsBloggers in general were true content producers, they penned their thoughts, oblivious to the scrutiny of any hawkish editor, their idea came into existence in true raw form, uncensored and unmanipulated by any grand content policy, they made abundant errors, from mere spelling mistakes too hideous grammatical blunders, but they wrote, they debated, they argued, and oft they just had a good time. For them literally any platform with an audience would do just right, and in the midst of their hunt for their own audience, this content producer aka blogger aka citizen journalist got lost in the frenzy and their content hijacked into a wormhole by the very same platforms they choose to embrace, the content no longer belonged to them, but instead held captive by the platforms owners to use as and when they please, to up-expose or down-expose as per their own algorithm of human brainfart research to best cater to their audience.

The same happened to me at Teeth Maestro, in early 2011, I too did notice a definite shift of my content writing swaying towards facebook, and the shorter updates predominantly towards Twitter. The pandoras box on facebook grew worse when in mid-2011 facebook removed the 300-word limit on status update – this meant that all the “long version” updates had conveniently found a more permanent home on facebook, than on my blog. Initially I saw no harm in it, a captive audience existed and I had ideas and opinions to share, but unbeknownst to me they too controlled how many people saw my content on that particular day, and if one were to miss the particular time slot, my update was lost forever into their digital web – I initially considered as a small downside, and presumed it as a perfect marriage…. until….

I decide to search for something that I may have written on facebook or twitter maybe a month or even a year back….. try finding it …. Good Luck …. a simple search on facebook simply won’t cut it, you need to go scrolling forever, and if patient enough you could be lucky, a little easier on twitter but you better be a guru at using “operators” else you may as well be fishing in the dark, since Google search bar can’t even scratch a nail searching for your search terms on twitter and facebook

What has happened in this social media platform wars, is each portal has isolated and locked the other out, made it progressively more difficult for you to walk down memory lane, our content has truly been hijacked and this problem will continue to get worse for many content producers until you explicitly decide to say – This is my content and I have the right to own it.

Take ownership of your Social Media contentA week back – Teeth Maestro decided just that – This is my content and I have the right to own it – Now whatever I post on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Delicious, Instagram or any other platform I post on, it gets automagically sucked into my wordpress blog platform by IFTTT or some other nifty tool. Initially they are stored as drafts and then it is at my own discretion which items I choose to make public, maybe a little edits here and there, formatting changes …. but it is then that my blog becomes my honeypot of my content. To many it won’t matter, my audience can continue to prefer their of platform of choice, but to me, I have decided to wrestle control of my own content away from the behemoth locked-down social media portals

I strongly urge all content producers / bloggers / citizen journalists – to take time to setup a re-blogging platform which pulls all your content into one searchable database, be it from facebook or twitter or even instagram. Take ownership of your content and not be held hostage to the whims of a marketing strategy of a tech company

Reblogging may be a minor inconvenience to many content producers but do it as your own right to own this content


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