Categorisation

One of the areas I've been thinking about recently is where to put things. I've noticed several people talking about how mail isn't thebest way for them to communicate because it's too easily swamped.

I've now got 5 methods of communication: email, instant messaging, newsgroups, web and journal.

I tend to use MSN Messenger for a chat when someone else is online. It's the most 'chatty' of the methods, and the one where I'm mostly likely to chat about nothing much with people, because they're there.

Email is the next most chatty, but has the advantage of being asynchronous, so I can send a mail and then go off and do other things, expecting the at some unspecified future point. It's also a handy 'inbox' for all sorts of information (weekly film timetale udates, daily comics, etc.) and good for group discussions where the size of group isn't large enough for a newsgroup.

Newgroups are fantastic both for discussion with large numbers of people and for information retrieval. When I need the answer to a computer question, someone else has pretty much always had the same problem before and solved it on usenet. Which means I can use Google Groups to track down the solution.

I use my website for fairly permanent storage. Pictures of me, articles I found inspiring, things I wrote that I want to keep long term, that kind of thing. I also use it to link to my journal, and to keep my wants list (Originally created for me to keep track of things I wanted, now used whenever someone asks me what I want for my birthday).

My Journal is used for ranting, venting and ideas, some of which may at some point become refined enough to end up on the website itself.

Now, I run a few mailing lists, and am in several more. When I have something I want to show to people (yes, I have the whole attention-getting thing, where when I receive an interesting thing I want to forward it on) do I mail it to all my friends, post it to livejournal, or stick it on the website?

Or all of the above? Which would feel redundant, despite the fact that I'm sure most of my friends don't scan my journal or website very often.

Requires more thought.

Addendum: I've just noticed that this is my 50th entry! Whoo! Doing a quick count, this brings me up to about 13000 words. Bloody hell!

Discussions

I've been having discussions about gaming terminology with Joe over the last couple of days (plainly, seeing as he's taken two days to fail to recognise the ultimate brilliance of my arguments, he must be pretty dumb, huh?)

So, when I got home and wrote something utterly brilliantly insightful and witty in response to one of his drab, uninspiring emails, he came through from the other room (yes, we have computers in 3 of the flat's 7 rooms) and asked me to pop through.

I wander through to the kitchen, to find him holding a frying pan and telling me that he's either going to get this point through to me, or batter it through with the frying pan.

The point being, that when I told Erin (Girlfriend du jour) about this, she told me she knows exactly how he feels.

(Oh, and we sorted our differences. He grovelled and begged forgiveness and I was magnanimous as always).