Guest: @kimonostereo
Release date: March 26, 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 the community manager at Micro.blog, and I’m so pleased to have on the show Scott Yoshinaga, also known as @kimonostereo.
kimonostereo: 00:00:31 Hey.
macgenie: 00:00:32 Hey Scott! So we have the Micro.blog microcast questions and I’m going to pose them to you because I’m really interested to hear about your experience at Micro.blog, starting with: How did you hear about Micro.blog?
kimonostereo: 00:00:50 I think I heard about it first when Manton was doing his Kickstarter, through John Gruber. And I kind of I liked it but I couldn’t quite figure out how this was going to work. So I put it in the back of my mind. Then, after the Kickstarter had completed, Mr. Gruber used it, and I guess he cross posted it to Twitter, something about sports and I took a look at it. I thought, “Hey it’s this Micro.blog thing. Let’s check out what that’s all about.” And at that time you still couldn’t sign up for it, unless you were a Kickstarter participant. But there was a little e-mail box to sign up if you wanted to be notified when it was open to other people coming in. So I did that and I think I got my invitation right before I took a trip to Japan for vacation. So I signed up for my account.
kimonostereo: 00:01:57 And it was at the time, I am on the airplane, thinking about this thing and I’m like, “Hey what I’m reading is correct, I can do this from my own blog, which I used to do a lot of. That might be more fun than just using the straight Micro.blog. So when I get back, let me figure out how to you know how to make that all work.” And so that’s what I did. I ended up digging up my Moveable Type blog and trying to figure out how to hook it up to Micro.blog, and the rest is history because now that day I figured it out, I’ve been posting regularly and it’s been a lot of fun.
macgenie: 00:02:41 That leads to my next question which is: How are you using your microblog?
kimonostereo: 00:02:51 First thing is, I’ve wanted to blog again. I wanted to do more writing but getting into it was kind of a major pain point for me because I want to make the blog look nice and all of that stuff. But I decided to just jump in on it and just see what the community was about. It’s mostly to get a feel of how this whole system was working and now that I’m in it, it’s been really interesting to see just the different people that are on it. It really feels like early Twitter days, I guess, like right when Twitter started. You can see everyone’s @ replies, anyone that you’re following and you just discover a whole lot of different characters that are out there. And there’s not so much of what’s currently on Twitter now, which is mostly retweets and marketing stuff. So I’ve been using it just to meet other people online that are doing the same thing and seeing what they’re what they’re using it for. I’m planning to write some longer posts, once I get my blog up and running the way I wanted to.
macgenie: 00:04:16 It’s a really good point about Twitter and how it felt in the beginning. And like you said, we could see everybody’s replies.
kimonostereo: 00:04:25 That was a big thing.
macgenie: 00:04:27 I remember when they changed it and people were like, “But, but, how will I find people to follow?”
kimonostereo: 00:04:35 Exactly. I still remember that day. We’re kind of dumbfounded at that change. You know, I have this love/hate thing with Twitter. This past winter, I completely dropped out of Facebook. I just decided to quit. So I just stop going there. The only way can manage Twitter today is by using lists and I use Twitter less for various different things that I’m interested in, but it’s nowhere near as interesting as Micro.blog is.
macgenie: 00:05:10 The third question we have is: Did you have a blog before Micro.blog?
kimonostereo: 00:05:15 I was blogging way back in 2002, I think, and that was one of the earlier versions of Movable Type. I remember that making a blog was something so new, noone understood what it was, it was like the beginning stages, I guess, of social media where you would post, I don’t know about anybody else, but I had on my sidebar what I’m listening to and what I’m watching and what I’m reading and my top 10 favorite CDs. (If you remember CDs!) And then when other people started having blogs, I had a blog roll.
macgenie: 00:05:58 Blog roll! I forgot about that!
kimonostereo: 00:06:01 Those were the days, right? And it’s interesting to see how everything turned into a silo, for example there was Live Journal and then it was MySpace, and then it was Facebook and Twitter. And instead of writing for yourself and owning that content, you started creating on other people’s platforms. I just lost interest in doing that part, the writing part, you just stop thinking about doing it and then you forget that you used to do that before, where you actually put some thought into what you’re writing about, and you had a topic, and all those other things. It’s kind of neat that Micro.blog lets you do both. You can have the the social side, and if you wanted to do some thought pieces, you could also do that at the same time. But aside from that, when I got married, my wife and I started a webcomic called Nemu-Nemu, and we used that as a nother kind of blogging in itself, publishing a webcomic via a CMS and talking about the creative process and how we come up with ideas and sharing those ideas with other people. Now we’ve been blogging for a very long time and this is just another good way to get back into it .
macgenie: 00:07:39 So Nemu-Nemu is the website where people can find the comic ?
kimonostereo: 00:07:48 Yeah, the comic is Nemu-Nemu.com. And that’s me and my wife. We do that. She’s the artist and I helped her do the writing and the website and all that other stuff.
macgenie: 00:07:59 That’s quite an undertaking, I imagine.
kimonostereo: 00:08:02 Yeah it’s it’s been a labor of love. We’re currently on hiatus. But you know, we’re always working on new ideas, so hopefully fairly soon we’ll have another good comic idea come out.
macgenie: 00:08:18 Well, is there anything else you’d like to add? We have talked a bit about what you like about Micro.blog, which is the last question, but if there was something you wanted to add to that, let me know.
kimonostereo: 00:08:31 I’m just really interested in seeing how this platform grows. It’ll be interesting to see what comes next. Because as platforms grow, usually things tend to get harder for the community in general because there’s so much weight. But I don’t know, we’ll see. Everyday I see new people being introduced and the Discover page is just great to find new people. So I’m just glad that you guys have this community for me to play around in.
macgenie: 00:09:12 Oh, great! I’m so glad you’re there and I really have enjoyed your posts. And of course I’ve enjoyed chatting with you today for the Micro.blog Microcast. So let’s wrap it up here and we will talk to you all next week. Thanks for being here Scott.
kimonostereo: 00:09:33 Thank you for having me.
