Guest: @modernlittleme
Release date: March 19, 2018
@macgenie: 00:00:12 Hey, it’s Micro Monday again, the weekly microcast where we get to know members of the Micro.blog community. I’m Jean MacDonald, Community Manager at Micro.blog. And today I’m with Christine Lane who is also known as @modernlittleme on Micro.blog. Hey Christine, welcome to the podcast.
@modernlittleme: 00:00:32 Hi there. Thanks for having me. I’m excited about this.
@macgenie: 00:00:35 One funny thing I noticed about doing this podcast is that, until I emailed you to ask you to be a guest, I didn’t even know your first name or last name.
@modernlittleme: 00:00:46 I know. It occurs to me that I don’t think I have it on there. I think I signed up all incognito and then got into it more than I thought I would.
@macgenie: 00:00:57 Let’s hear about your your experiences with Micro.blog. First off, tell me: how did you first hear about Micro.blog?
@modernlittleme: 00:01:06 I actually heard about it from my husband who was a part of the Kickstarter campaign. Although he hasn’t been on there recently, he came out strong and then disappeared for a little while there. But I expect him to be back.
@macgenie: 00:01:20 Yeah I think that’s not an unusual situation for a lot of people, myself included, because it’s a new platform, it’s a new system, it is not like anything that’s being done elsewhere. So getting the hang of it for yourself is a process. It’s not going to happen overnight.
@modernlittleme: 00:01:42 No, it definitely doesn’t.
@macgenie: 00:01:45 Now, what are you doing with your microblog? What are you primarily using it for?
@modernlittleme: 00:01:56 Well I joined Micro.blog as a way to start writing more, again just kind of collecting all those thoughts that would flip through my head but I wouldn’t write them down, like physically tangibly write them down. And I was like, “Well, hey, this might be a great way to write them down and not forget them and revisit them later. But now really I’m just using it as a way to kind of track life, as simple as that. I don’t post on Facebook, I don’t post on Twitter. I want to own my thoughts, I don’t want somebody else to own them. I guess that’s basically it, just random little snippets of life that I don’t want to forget. Whether it’s something the kids did, or something that I saw, or just a great moment when I was teaching, or something as minor as “Hey, I did it.”
@macgenie: 00:02:49 Right. Well, you have a lot of you have a lot of interests and hobbies and skills. I think you have a lot of material to work with. You’re a knitter, right? Am I right about that or is it some other craft?
@modernlittleme: 00:03:07 Quilter. I’m a quilter and a sometimes knitter, but more a quilter right now. I’m a sewist.
@macgenie: 00:03:18 You’re a sew-er?
@modernlittleme: 00:03:18 Yeah, I call it sewist.
@macgenie: 00:03:19 Oh that’s a good word for it. And of course you have kids who are totally adorable and I love when you post photos of them. And you have a hedgehog.
@modernlittleme: 00:03:32 We have a menagerie, yes. We have a greyhound rescue. My oldest son has a bearded dragon and I have a hedgehog. So I’m aiming to have a zoo at some point in my life. At the very least, a menagerie.
@modernlittleme: 00:03:56 Did you have a blog before you started at Micro.blog? Or do you actually have another blog now as well?
@modernlittleme: 00:04:06 So I’m all over the map on this one. So I started a blog, it would have been 10 years last month, of our adoption journey to our first son. So that was in 2008. I started just kind of chronicling that whole journey to South Korea and back again.Then I would blog about life with him after he came home. And then we did our second journey with the younger one. Again I blogged about the journey, but then after he came home, it got a little weird to just keep writing about my kids. The oldest one knew at that point what was going on and was starting to skew. You know. like “Don’t post about that,” or “You should post about that.” It wasn’t as sweet and innocent anymore. And simultaneously during the adoption of our second son, I was blogging on a parenting blog called Hellobee. So I have those blogs, and then I had my modern little me blog that I wasn’t doing anything with. There was no motivation and that’s when I made the decision to join Micro.blog and try to get that groove back . I don’t know if you’ve ever suffered that, but all of a sudden you’re like “I don’t know what to write.” Writer’s block in the extreme.
@macgenie: 00:05:38 It is hard to keep up that level of content producing, even if you don’t do it a lot, but just to do it consistently and feel inspired consistently. At least with Micro.blog, I can post a couple sentences every day if I want to. And I get something on paper, as it were, not actual paper obviously, and the I love the fact that while I’m in the app posting things as if I were on Twitter, I’m getting an actual blog out of that process, instead of just a Twitter timeline that I would never send anybody to. So what do you like about Micro.blog? Is there anything you haven’t mentioned so far that you’d like to add, before we wrap this up?
@modernlittleme: 00:06:34 I think the key is just the ownership. Own your stuff. I’m trying to get back to blogging and owning that as well. And I’d probably do it all through Micro.blog if I could figure out how to make it look pretty. I don’t have that skill set. I’ll eventually merge those two things together a bit better. I really enjoy that there’s an anonymity to the follower counts, like you don’t know how many people or who they are. I know that’s a debate on Micro.blog. I like that because the reason I got into it was not for an audience. It was really kind of an online journal for myself. I have connected there to people who either are geographically close to me or have similar interests, usually in the photography scene or just in the parenting world. I haven’t found another sewist yet, maybe I’m missing somebody. I just like that it’s a more naturally organically growing community.
@macgenie: 00:07:53 I like it too. I didn’t like it in the beginning because I was heavily steeped in Twitter. And when when we launched the platform every day, I would be askingk Manton questions: “How are we going to know who is following us? How are we going to find people? How are we going to do this, that and the other thing?” My mantra now is, “Manton knows what he’s doing. You trust Manton’s judgment. If you wanted it to be just like Twitter, why are you here?” So yeah, I totally drank the Manton koolaid as I sometimes say.
@modernlittleme: 00:08:42 Exactly. Just like no hashtags.
@macgenie: 00:08:52 I don’t know if you’ll agree with this, but I have started taking all my photos in square format, unless it’s something that absolutely doesn’t fit, because I agree with Manton that it looks better in the app if your photos are square. But that bugged me and I know it bugs a lot of people. There are ways to have to avoid having your photos cropped as square in Micro.blog. But I was like you know what? It’s a limitation and that’s a thing that you want in art, to work within the limitation.
@modernlittleme: 00:09:32 I think I had crossed that bridge of being square-format-adverse well before I came into the Micro.blog community so to me it was something I had already worked through. As a photographer, I liked to have a wide range of options. But I agree. The square format, especially when you’re scrolling through something, it just appeals to me aesthetically and you know what? Sometimes I have it as a horizontal. Sometimes I have it as a a vertical and then I drop it and post it. I still have the originals wherever they might be, on my camera or on my phone.
@macgenie: 00:10:14 That’s true. Well I thank you so much for coming on, for being the first guest in this podcast series, and I’m really glad we had this chance to talk. I’m really glad we had a time limit because really, I could stay on the phone with you all day now, talk about photos and, of course, guinea pigs. We didn’t even MENTION them, on purpose.
@modernlittleme: 00:10:39 Otherwise it would be like the huge long, not-microcast.
@macgenie: 00:10:44 That’s right. So thanks again and thanks to everybody for listening. We’ll talk to you next week.
@modernlittleme: 00:10:51 Thanks so much for having me. I enjoyed it.
