Sometimes I have my pictures shot and everything ready to post and I paste in the bit of code from Flickr® for my first picture and come to a dead stop, tripped up by lack of a title or any sort of idea for the post. It’s then that I envy those bloggers who started out numbering their posts. I could just call this 1643 and be done with it. Instead, though, I resorted to that best of all places for help, advice and suggestions, the much-maligned world of Plurk. Within minutes I had plenty of ideas. I think the first idea was to let my cat choose my title.

Plurk is sort of like Twitter in that it is based on 140 character plurks of information, but unlike twitter, all responses hang into a single plurk drop-down window on your timeline. It has a large contingent of Second Life users and unlike so many other social media, embraces Second Life exuberantly. You can have your pseudonymous avatar account, no questions asked. You can even list your home as Second Life and Second Life has its own special front page. Because it has such a large cross-section of Second Life, it brings people from many different walks of SLife together. Anytime you have lots of people in the public square, folks will bump shoulders and have a dispute here and there. That’s human nature and is not caused by Plurk, but by the gravitational pull of the numbers of participants. However, Plurk provides all the tools we need to avoid conflict. It’s just that we choose not to mute, block and disregard. As Cassius said, “The fault, Dear Brutus, is not in the stars. But in ourselves…” Plurk is what you make it and I have found it a wonderful community of brave, bold and creative people.
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