So how much do you participate in online activities (time, effort), which sites do you frequent and why do you frequent them?

The activities can be

• Maintaining your own blog(s)
• Participate in forums (not necessarily programming related ones)
• Online games
• Instant messaging
• E-commerce (eBay, Amazon)
• Social media sites

I'm still not sure how to define social media sites, so my definition includes bookmarking sites too. Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Slashdot, Furl, Delicious, Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed, Facebook, MySpace (and I'm sure I missed listing some of the major ones...).

This is really for personal research and knowledge purposes. I write regularly to my blog. I update my Twitter and Plurk accounts fairly regularly. I'm a dormant StumbleUpon user. And I answer interesting questions and posts here at D.I.C.

Here's the killer question: Do you consciously direct your participation to promote and improve your blog (even if indirectly)? For example, some people post a Twitter update when they've got a new blog post up.

This post has been edited by orcasquall: 10 Jul, 2008 - 05:24 AM

I post here on DIC, and one other forum (my own) though it is fairly dead...

Most of the time I don't worry about things DIC and RG are 2 different sites with different purposes so their worlds don't mingle very often. I post a link in my sig, if people want to check it out they can.

I used to play a lot on Guildwars but I got bored of it so I haven't played it in quite a while. Other than that I don't do much online.

The only blog I update is my own, other than that I float around a fair variety of online communities. I run a facebook account, my twitter updates automatically when a new blog post goes up on my site but other than that its currently unused, E-commerce makes christmas and birthday shopping far too easy so I'd be dumb not to use them.

I've played my share of online games, MMOs (EvE, WoW, PotBS) and FPS (CS:S, UT3 etc).

Any community I'm part of includes a link back to my blog somewhere in my profile, but I don't conciously direct my activities (apart from anything else directing my activities to sites related to my blog would be difficult considering how undirected the blog is). If people read it they read it, if they don't they don't. Obviously any increase in my readership is nice and would help my focus in regards to the damn thing but hunting for readers personally rather than just tweaking a few things in the SEO pack seems far too much like hard work too me

Hmm... I was actually expecting deeper online involvement...

I wonder... are technical bloggers more "laid back"? The bloggers I read from copywriting, creating writing, internet marketing, business are more prolific in their content production and online involvement.

Correction. Jeff Atwood seems to have upped his blogging frequency since his departure from his previous employment. So maybe I haven't found enough technical bloggers to draw a conclusion from.

Or maybe I asked in the wrong way. On hindsight, my original question post was a bit long...

This post has been edited by orcasquall: 11 Jul, 2008 - 08:20 AM

Don't be hasty, you've only had 2 replies so far. not exactly a representative sample

haha!

Let's see....

I spend a large amount of time here on DIC.
I spend a large amount of time on my Guild Wars Guild Forums.
I play Guild Wars - too much.
I have my work site to maintain.
I have my humor blog to write.
I have a MySpace page (which I've locked myself out of)...
A Facebook page...
Twitter...
Numerous Blogroll-type sites to get listings and rankings up...
A few other blogs that I frequent...
Nevermind that I make my living on the interwebz (developer)....

So... yeah.... 50% of my life exists in an intangible realm....
Of the remainder? 25% spent yelling at my kids and 25% spent sleeping/showering/cleaning/cooking/laundry-ing/on the porch smoking ... man, I need to get out more!

I've been blogging for years, it has become a part of life for me.

It's nice to have a place to share my thoughts and ideas, product reviews, and tech news that I stumble upon. Recently I've been putting a lot of effort into networking with other bloggers and gaining readership. More traffic also = more revenue opportunities.

So I'd say that I'm fairly involved in everything.

Hey thanks! I was just wondering how people use their online time...

BenignDesign, I prefer Plurk than Twitter. I'm not logged in the entire day anyway, so I find it hard to imagine people with a constant stream of twitters at hand.

MarkoDaGeek, I'm working on the networking part too. Having only about 3 hours of free time every night makes blogging a bit challenging... Commuting and work hours take a large chunk of the day.