While I love all these wonderful social sites like Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter and various other clever services that tend to end in -r, I am starting to feel like I spread myself thin across the internet. So many places to post stuff to, so many places that contain fragments of my thought streams. It’s hard to keep track of me.

As I wrote, I feel that I have a certain expected level of quality for things I want to post on my personal site. While I grin just as much as anyone else at lolcats, that’s not really stuff I’d like to post here.

I’ve started experimenting a bit with Tumblr — you can find me here. Just like I enjoy the 140-character format of Twitter, the Tumbler format of posting various short text snippets, quotes and images is also very appealing. That default theme doesn’t quite agree with me about what a quote is, though. I have a habit of finding interesting quotes that can span several paragraphs, so blowing up the text size like that can get confusing. But I’ll fiddle with that later.

But Tumblr is still an experiment for me. I don’t find myself wanting to post there that frequently. Twitter is still the main source for my thought streams. I’ll keep fiddling with it for a while, and if I find a format that works for me I’ll try to incorporate it into my social stream.

So here’s the crux of it: do I try to tie it all together on my personal site, or just leave it with links to the various services I use?

Let’s look at what some other people do.

Jon Tan has a front page that is not the actual blog, but contains the first sentences from the latest blog entries prominently displayed in the center column. He then uses a very condensed format of asides, with just a link to the services he uses, and then a link to a separate page titled Asides, also linked from the top of the page. The Asides page itself looks very good and readable. One column with bookmarks from Delicious, one column with tweets from Twitter, and a third column with thumbnails from Flickr and Upcoming events below those.

Great idea, might steal it.

dooce has a two-column layout with Twitter and Flickr items in the sidebar. Classic blog layout, not much else to say about it. Still looking great though.

It started with Zeldman, so it might as well end there too. He has the two-column layout with a note on where he will be speaking (hey, offline thought streams counts too), a single tweet and a list of the recent entries in the sidebar.

Time to think it over. I’ll probably think by sketching out a new layout for the site. Tends to end up that way when I think design.