As much as I love Twitter, I’ve been spending a lot more time on Google+ over the past couple of months. The growth of the network has been absolutely explosive, and readers are flocking there in droves. Since part of my job at the Knight Digital Media Center is working on their social media presence, and the other part involves helping journalists to use digital tools effectively, I wrote up this blog post yesterday:

How Journalists Can Start Using Google+ Now

The jury’s still out on whether Google+ will eventually become a Twitter or Facebook killer. Talk to Facebook users and they’ll tell you Google+ is irrelevant – that the audience is too small, that their friends aren’t there1, or that only early adopters and geeks are posting. Business Insider says Facebook will wipe the floor with Google+. But the numbers tell another story, and if it’s not time for journalists to start using the platform today, it’ll soon be too big to ignore.

Meet me there!

Never mind black-hat SEO and the mostly closed ecosystem of the second internet (Facebook) – the web is facing a possibly even bigger nemesis in “content farms” like Demand Media, which attempt to game the search + advertising money machine that is Google. I knew that content farms were a big problem (Google even recently released a Chrome plugin that would let end users identify non-useful content on the internet so it could be deprecated in search results). But check out the infographic below. It’s all interesting, but wrap your head around the the raw numbers: “Demand’s goal is to publish 1 million articles/month (30,000 articles per day)” — all crap content written by underpaid writers churning out intentional baloney, all with the intention of skimming pennies and dollars out of AdWords. In the process, they’re wrecking the quality of the search results you rely on every day, and filling the web with bile and nonsense. Staggering.

[Source: OnlineMBA.com]

A few years ago, before Twitter and Facebook cleaned the clock of the blogosphere, I used to do all my posting here, and sent regular email updates summarizing activity at Birdhouse. But like most bloggers, the meteoric rise of Twitter and Facebook took a lot of the wind out of the sails of this site, and I started posting a lot of content at social networks instead.

Contrary to popular belief, Twitter did not “kill” this blog. I’ve been posting here all along, just with much less frequency. If you stopped reading when I started Tweeting, scroll back through the past couple of years – there’s still been action on Birdhouse.

Still, I’ve never quite felt comfortable with putting so much on the social networks. I want to own my content. I want to control the design. I want to control how media and code samples are embedded. I don’t always like being restricted to length limits. I really really don’t like that almost everything posted to Facebook is invisible to most of the world (I feel strongly that the internet is at its best when it’s a public square).

Long story short, in 2011 I intend to start posting more content to Birdhouse. And I’m resurrecting Birdhouse Updates, the email digest version of this site. Want to get occasional updates of new stuff happening here? Enter your email on the Birdhouse Subscribe page and reply to the confirmation email you’ll receive. (If you’re reading this via email, you’re already subscribed).

For the geeks among you, I’ve written a new WordPress plugin called SoloMail, which I’ll be using to send the updates. Let me know if you find it useful.

Blogging isn’t dead! (it just smells funny :) Happy 2011.