Wherein Dave’s data stream becomes still more convoluted

I keep wanting to do a big chart showing how the various things I write and link to flow … but I haven’t quite gotten around to it. If I had, I’d now need to add one more arrow.

I use Google Reader a lot, both to track RSS feeds from many websites and to, in turn, share (often with notes) those feed items that catch my eye. I currently get those shared items (alternately viewable here, or through an Atom feed here) reposted nightly (through the Digest Post WordPress plugin) to this blog as one of the various “Unblogged Bits” posts (for example, here). I do that as a way to save those links and annotations in a more durable fashion.

Of late, of course, everyone’s all about Twitter, going so far as to call RSS dead in the face of the Tweet. Which is like saying that Apples have replaced Steak as America’s favorite food (they’re both good foods, but they serve very different, if superficially related, needs). Still, while I have a Twitter feed (or two) that I use (and publish back to my blog via the Twitter Tools WordPress plugin, for example here), I still felt like there was a disconnect. Should I share something I run across in GReader? Or in Twitter? Or somehow both?

Then I found (through GReader) Reader2Twitter. This is a free service that will route your Google Reader shared items over to Twitter, to amaze and astound your friends (or add some traffic to your Twitter channel, if it’s lacking). Sweet!

Except … I share dozens, sometimes many dozens, of items in GReader. I suspect my Twitter followers (the real ones) wouldn’t appreciate that, esp. as so many of them are already following me on GReader anyway.

So … I created yet another Twitter feed — UnbloggedBits — which is fed by Reader2Twitter from my Google Reader shared items. It even includes truncated versions of the notes I write on many of the shared items (I wish it could put a link to those, rather than truncating them; I may turn that part off). And, of course, there’s available an RSS feed of that Twitter feed of that GReader feed of RSS feeds from other places …

Thus, my burgeoning media empire grows. Or the Internet implodes. We’ll see.