Multiple Me: Integrating my digital self

I seem to be thinking a lot about integration these days, and I'm now trying to find the best way (and the time) to better integrate my online self, even as I find I want more online outlets for different kinds of thoughts and work.

I'm not the most diligent blogger out there, but I've been teaching about blogs in my NYU classes for several years. I first used my old archived movable type blog as a way to start getting comments and thoughts I wanted access to out of the prison of the school's LMS, but I wanted to try and get more than comments to my posts from the group --- it was still a little too much like lecturing.

I started using a collective blog for the class, but it never really seemed to take root. Posts by James Farmer and others suggested better success with individual blogs and gave me the inspiration to give that a try, but the setup and management of all those blogs quickly proved to be too much ... and it kept me in a position of being a centralized source when I was really looking for decentralization.

I couldn't handle two blogs, so I abandoned my old blog when my classes started collective blogging, and I started using Blogger last fall again mostly to support my classes -- I had run across Ulises Mejias's draft syllabus last summer (one of the bases for this article) and wanted to try something similar (though more modestly) in a graduate and a certificate class at NYU's Virtual College. (Incidentally, there's a webcast on the Mejias article scheduled for Thursday.) I felt that I had to change software though -- I was afraid that trying to incorporate RSS feeds into blogs using movable type would have had too high a learning curve -- particularly for the 10-week certificate class.

Using Blogger combined with Bloglines has worked pretty well for classes so far as a way to begin exploring programs like Flickr, Furl and del.icio.us, but now I'm itching a bit to start up my old blog again and post more substantially with a more customizable platform than Blogger affords. ... Of course, that means maintaining two blogs if I want to keep this blog going.

Here's where the multiples problem comes in... I already have a personal site that is languishing, and another that's pretty much a museum of the Web of the mid-1990s -- as well as a site for my consultancy collective, Grafeio that we're too busy working on projects to maintain and expand. (Thank goodness we don't have to rely on the site to bring in business.)

... Not to mention the content and misinformation related to me collecting on other sites that I don't have direct access to -- Just today I noticed that my faculty bio on the NYU SCPS web site is bizarrely incorrect. (How did anyone ever get confused enough to list my occupation as "Typographer"??? especially since I've been teaching and doing instructional design there for years now.)

I don't expect to be able to control everything posted about me out there, but some sort of integrated online presence is in order. Slowly, I'm starting to organize things a bit better and get a more coherent approach working... Having all my feeds and blogrolls linked from blog and to my Suprglu account is a start, but I have a ton of work ahead of me. And once I finish with that, I still have to tackle the problem of dealing with the dozen of email accounts I've accumulated....