Of Social Streams and RSS Feeds... and Ethical Tourism?
/It seems our "holy shit elephant trekking is bad" episode was oddly timely in a sad sort of way. The internet is blowing up over the unfortunate passing of Cecil the lion, and the court of public opinion is having a field day with the man who shot him.
I'm purposely not wading into that shit-storm. Instead, I'm acting on the request of one of our Patreon supporters (hi, Paul!) who's asked us to do a better job of consolidating the content we produce and distribute on a variety of channels. And I'm starting with the video of our initial encounter with elephant trekking in Phuket, the impetus of the afore-mentioned show.
We produce a lot of content on a variety of platforms. We both have YouTube accounts. Photos are split between Flickr, 500px, and Instagram. We both Tweet and we have an official Twitter account for the ShEvo experience. Two profiles and a page on Facebook, a pretense of staying active on Google+... and loads more. It's hard to keep up with us, and I get that.
If you're following us one one or more of those channels; don't worry. We're going to keep using them individually, without cross posting everything everywhere. And if you're a subscriber to our blog; don't worry. We're not going to flood our RSS feed with every status update and retweet. Neither of those options is the right solution.
We want to stay cognizant of our social stream expectations, yet not force anyone to sign up for every new service that we decide to try just to get our content. It's going to be a tough balance to maintain, and we'll probably make some decisions that don't suite everyone's fancy.
And therein lies the common thread for all three things I'm talking about in this post. (And I suggest taking this with a giant helping of YMMV -- your mileage may vary -- as a prophylactic.) For all our advances as a species, we do really, really stupid things sometimes. We can get better. We can get worse. I'm hoping for the former, but admit that I'll probably wander into the latter more than once while my time here is up. Let me know when I do?