How much land does a man need?

February 12, 2008

The blog title above is from a Tolstoy Story of the same name . In the story, a peasant boasts “If I had plenty of land, I shouldn’t fear the Devil himself”. The devil, upon hearing this story decides to tempt the man. The man is offered as much land as he can walk off in one day in a square, provided he returns to his starting point by sun down. The man gets greedy and walks too far for the first two sides and ends up cutting corners on the last two sides. He dies within sight of the end, the narrator stating that 6 feet of land (in which to be buried) was in the end all the man needed.

I’ve been feeling this way lately about my “web presence.” I’ve signed up for a lot of services and new sites to see what they are like and kept signing up for more to make sure I didn’t miss out. I’ve been going too far down the ‘first side’ grabbing as much land as I can. And now that I’m coming up on the last two sides (actually using it for something useful), I find I’m cutting corners.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Flickr, gmail/hotmail/yahoomail, zooomr, magnolia, greader, multiply, and utterz, biznik, and more were all sites I have a ‘presence’ on, only I don’t really. I have a user name, an existence but not really a presence.

For Facebook and LinkedIn (and PlaxoPulse) I’ve relegated those to rolodex and ‘long lost’ status, i.e. staying in touch with those on my list, and being on the site in case a long lost friend signs up and we find each other. Beyond that, I don’t really use them, and I’m cool with that.

I really like Multiply’s site, primarily because of the vastly better security controls, so I can envision keeping that as my kids get older. Every other site I am pruning down to remove duplicates, e.g. I don’t need to be on Flickr and zooomr, I don’t need to be on del.icio.us and magnolia, etc. I’m sticking with Flickr mainly because so many other tools I use have tools for Flickr pre-built, and while del.icio.us’ design is certainly minimalist, again, it has the tools elsewhere that I already use, e.g. browser buttons, RSS fees, so let’s just say I’m comfortable there.

For blogging, I am a Wordpress fan, I have the wordpress.org version downloaded and installed on BlueHost (a terrific web hosting company by the way). I’ve tried several blog readers and Google Reader is my favorite by far and away. Whitney Hess did a terrific comparison, Dr. Jack Ramsey style (for all you Bill Simmons readers out there).

And lastly, there is Twitter. I am not a Twitter guru, or someone who follows hundreds of people. I’ve stumbled across people and follow about 70 people and about 40 follow me. But this service has become as important to me as blog reading. I leave it up on my 2nd monitor (I happen to use Twitteriffic, but I find there’s not much difference in the Twitter clients unless you’re hard core) and occasionally glance over to ‘follow the stream’ as they go by. What’s amazed me is how this has become a source of breaking news for me much quicker than anything else. Off the top of my head, horrible weather, Bhutto’s assassination, election coverage, are all examples where I’ve heard it first on Twitter. I’ve started to follow people in my field, user experience design, and in my area, Minneapolis. Thanks to Twitter, I’m going to the inaugural Social Media Breakfast this week and am hoping to meet some people there as well.

I’m sure I’ll be tempted as new flavors of the month come out, but, for now, I’ve staked out my claim, got enough land, and want to enjoy it and cultivate it, before all I need is six feet.

six feet of land is all a man needs