But where to draw the line? And how?

At the moment I cross-post to:

• twitter
• jaiku
• Pownce
• facebook
• plaxo
• LinkedIn
• myspace

I’m considering removing facebook from the list and posting separately on that one, and I suppose I could target my posts to Plaxo and LinkedIn more acurately to their intended audience. On the other hand, I do enjoy posting ridiculously personal status updates to up-tight-ish LinkedIn.

Any thoughts on cross-posting out there? (other than “don’t”)

Personally, I could do without the super polished blog posts, the overly edited and TV-like Youtube vids, the head shots on Flickr (I want to see the pictures you TAKE, not pictures of you!), but at least social software has a significant role in this election – I guess we’ll get round to proper and credible use next time.

All that aside, there are two things that interest me the most this time around:

Microblogging

I wrote about this before, but from an American perspective.

I would LOVE to see a candidate or two start using microblogging actively in this campaign.

[UPDATE: Turns out Naser Khader is micro blogging on ZYB - interesting choice of platform. I'd love to hear the reasons behind it - and The Conservatives are on Twitter (it's embedded into a very heavy site, so I didn't notice at first... but at least they've made sure to test everything before they launched ]

The candidates may not have the time it takes to build communities around their twitter accounts (since Jaiku is in private beta, Twitter seems to be the only logical choice in terms of platforms [!]), but I think a heck of a lot can be gained from importing tweets into regular websites and blogs – especially since the candidates will be out and about for the next three weeks, with limited time in front of their laptops. Microblogging could well be a powerful tool.

The use of social networking services

Facebook groups are emerging, and Danish candidates ar rallying for support in already established networks, which, at least when it comes to parties with limited funds, is a brilliant strategy.

How it evolves and how successful it turns out to be is anyones guess. First of all I think it depends on the level of participation and commitment of candidates themselves. But hey, that’s old news, right?

Looking forward to seeing how much of a difference online social networks can make in a three week campaign. And whether or not any of the candidates dare engage in campaign twittering!

Turns out the boys and girls at Google agree. They’ve just bought the Finish startup for an undisclosed amount of gDollars, and across the board of Jaiku users people are congratulating Jyri, Petteri and the rest of the Jai-crew.

This announcement ticked in from the Jaiku guys late last night:

Wonderful Jaiku users,

Exciting news, Jaiku is joining Google!

While its too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together.

In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now. But fear not! All our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will continue to be able to invite your friends to Jaiku.

We have put together a quick Q&A about the acquisition at http://jaiku.com/help/google

Jyri Engestrom and Petteri Koponen, Jaiku Founders

So, what’s the first order of business for Google? Beta-fy the sh%€! Jaiku is – as of now – in Google-beta-land, and will be invite only, for a while.

This Jaukunaut personally hopes that the purchase will mean tons of resources for the development of the phenomenon that has become Jaiku, and let me just join the choir of people who are shouting: ‘congrats guys! now knuckle down and make it even better!’

Read more on the Jaikido blog.

• The sleek design
• The beautiful back end (yes, I said beautiful back end. Go ahead and giggle)
• The shear simplicity of posting
• The richness it provided when importing feeds

But I left it because of a few things that I was seriously missing:

• Comments – why does this have to be one way? (I hear they’re working on that)
• Image feeds not showing up as images (they do – except the ones fetched via Jaiku – which is understandable)
• The fact that I was already well into Jaiku, which provided me with many of the same features and more (although not in nearly as well executed design, I might add)

Now, spurred on by a recent discussion on Jaiku, I’ve decided to give tumblr another go. So I’ve added a Tumblr link to my navigation, and i sincerely hope that tumblr fulills its potential. Because I really like the idea of it, and I still believe there’s something there. An as to why I put the link next to the RSS link. Well, it’s all in the spirit of syndication, right?

More on tumblelogs here.

BTW – someone out there must have some really cool ideas for using tumblelogs. Out of the box stuff. Drop a link or an idea in a comment.