Well, after having to push the old heap, jump in, and turn the keys.

There may not be many visible changes, but after a lengthy ordeal which I will not even attempt to recount, I have successfully updated my Wordpress engine – from Yahoo’s unbudging 2.0.2 to the latest, 2.3.1.

Naturally, I lost a number of plugins along the way. While it’s nice to trim the fat, I do hope that an updated Flickr plugin comes along quick. Jennifer-Scriptygoddess’s javascript “more” content show/hide was very nice, and though WeyHan Ng’s “Post Teaser” seemed like a good replacement, it seems to fail to update my changes to its wordy defaults.

What makes me happiest is that I can finally user TwitterTools. It’s not that I have ever been an active Tweeter, it’s that, between (poorly) maintaining this blog, and the ever-more-popular Facebook status microblogging-for-the-masses, I couldn’t bring myself to spend time on a platform I couldn’t easily cross-post to. Now that Twitter has fixed their Facebook status-push app, TwitterTools is even more handy.

My goal is to use my blog as both a main hub and a central repository for my online activity. I don’t care if it is an in- or an out-point, so long as whatever I want to share, comment on, or add to the web gets passed through, and logged, here. I will look into Del.icio.us digest posting – I know it’s out there waiting for me. I would love something that allowed me to push Facebook Posts, which I find is the most reliably viewed format of social, well, not bookmarking, but maybe surfing, out there. If I could email-post a cool story or link, and my commentary, from within Google reader, and have it propagate automatically to Digg, del.icious, Facebook, and all the other social sites that I have parked (abandoned?) a profile on, I would be golden. That would be a truly “distributed self”.

Which boomerangs into the reactionary criticism of the social web, where navel-gazing can be confounded with vanity and exhibitionism. I think that misses the point by overshooting. The growing pains of behaviour within these new enabling technologies should not be mistaken as arguments against them.

There may be a million new social self-marketers who want to exploit technology to capture what can now be but 15 seconds of fame. But isn’t it self-affirmation a common human impulse? It is cynical to reduce all forms of engagement in social media to insecure attention-mongering, sensational grandstanding, and shameless self-promotion. There is no shame in opening your mouth to say, “I’m here, and this is what I think.” Disembodied before the virtual roundtable, piping up a bit is the only way to be seen – even if it’s in a digital funhouse mirror.