OneMind

A few weeks ago, my good friend David Gewirtz responded to a question I’d sent him about improving my visibility on the Net with a fairly direct message that contradicted all I thought I knew about using the Web for promotion. In essence, he advised me not to attempt to pigeon-hole myself as “just” a spiritual teacher (my new calling) but to take full advantage of my background as what was once characterized as being a “Renaissance Technoid.” Rather than try to disengage from my lifelong passions for sports, technology, politics and books in favor of a sort of “clean slate” approach to my reinvention, he suggested, I should instead try to leverage my breadth and depth of background in these areas to find effective ways to attract a portion of my existing audience to follow me into the deeper, calmer waters of spirituality.

A decade or more ago, I was preaching the notion that we had entered what I dubbed “The Age of the Generalist” in which those with such broad backgrounds as I had would be found to be more valuable by society than those with narrow specialties. I guess that when that message seemed to fall on deaf ears, I abandoned the effort and went about trying to figure out what (one thing) I wanted to be when (if) I grew up.

I have spent many, many hours since David’s last email pondering his advice. And I’ve concluded he’s right. I had begun to reflect that notion already to some extent when I redesigned my personal Web presence to reflect the six aspects of Dan Shafer. Though David was considerably less than complimentary about the design of that site (an issue I am now considering), he was almost certainly right that the multi-dimensional approach to the design that I took was instinctively right.

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I’m wondering if anyone knows of a tool that would let me do this crazy thing I have been thinking about this morning.

When I post a new entry to my blog, I’d like a link to that entry to show up in Facebook (I think that already works, but I’m not sure), Twitter, and perhaps in other places I’m not thinking about.

I checked out Meebo, but it looks like it’s really about IMing across platforms rather than blog posting. I checked out FriendFeed briefly and it shows some promise but so far it doesn’t look like it does everything either.

Thoughts? If you don’t want to join my blog to post here, you can email me: dan at danshafer dot com.