Jonathan Deamer

A silly idea that occurred to me, but I like throwing ideas at the wall that is the internet and seeing what sticks.

The short version: in boring tweets about Twitter, we should include an ONML, or obligatory non-meta link so we don’t get sucked into an existential black hole of self-reference.

The long version: Tumblr and Twitter are the two online communities where I spend most of my idle web-browsing time. And as I’m curious, nosy, and essentially a geek, I’m always interested in what goes on behind the scenes at these sites, both technically and business-wise.  So a lot of my tweets and tumblelogging activities end up being about tweeting and tumblogging themselves.

I realised a while ago that this sort of meta-discussion is pretty dull for many people: not all my Twitter followers could really care about the platform itself, it just happens to be the place where they go to find out about music or politics or whatever interests them.  Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror blog has a great post about how “Meta Is Murder“, where he gives Joel Spolsky’s example that “all they’re talking about on this so-called ‘podcasting gear’ website is the podcasting gear website itself”.  Which I’m sure you’ll agree is pretty useless (not to mention boring) if you’re actually more interested in the message than the medium, as I’d guess those without my geeky “how does it work?” tendencies are.

So I made a conscious effort not to talk to much about Twitter or Tumblr so as not to scare away/alienate/bore to death my followers who innocently followed me looking for some music links.  And this self-imposed rule did mean my online output became a bit more focused.  Atwood and Spolsky’s Stack Overflow programming discussion site employs a similar method of banishing all meta-discussion to a dedicated forum, so as not to destroy their community with feature suggestions for the community itself.

But I’ve realised recently that there is some merit to these discussions; I tweet about all forms of new media and technologies, so why exclude what may be genuine insight (or at least a LOL) about Twitter just because that happens to be the medium I’m using at the time?  If nothing else, a shared interest every Tumblr user has is Tumblr itself. And we all like to write a blog post with “news about our blog” on the odd self-important occasion, right?

So perhaps the answer to the problem of meta-discussion is not to hide it all together, but to give it a value beyond self-reference. So I propose the introduction of an obligatory non-meta link (ONML) to be included in any tweet about Twitter or any blog post that’s just about how you’ve decided to change your WordPress theme.  So rather than post something that may alienate some of my readers, I simply add an ONML like this, and voila: a post that was potentially only of interest to a handful of people instantly becomes valuable to everyone by the inclusion of something that’s not solely self-referential and meta. Because everyone likes pictures of cute stuff.

Or alternatively: I come across a lot of cool stuff online that I want to share, but don’t necessarily have much to say about it. It might not be the sort of thing my online friends would normally be interested in, but it’s worth pointing out nonetheless. So when characters are limited, why not kill two birds with one tweet (and mix metaphors while you’re at it) by mentioning something that would otherwise have been forgotten?

I’m going to try this a bit and see whether people are bemused or intrigued by it!