How important is it to partition our lives? It's typical to have more than one social context in modern life.  This is why dumping all of my posting presense into Twitter, for example, would not work. (And why Twitter itself gives the option for back-channel one-to-one messages.) This week I'm breaking those rules.  Will it work to mix up the contexts?

Or does it just annoy people who know me in one specialized group or context? 

(My photo above is from Flickr where I have a bunch of photography pals, but it is an image of another group, from the Sam Adams home brewing "Long Shot" competition that I judged last year. Beer judge friends are an extremely specific subset of all the communities I am part of!)

I posted some about this at a (now very infrequent) blog about social networks, online media and the like, set up some years ago at http://gailwilliams.wordpress.com/

The( few) people who follow that blog know me from Online Community professional circles.  They generally will not care about my beer judging or my beer education activities, and while it is not a secret,  I don't need to inflict those community activities and concerns on them! It's a courtesy to be aware of context, isn't it?

Then there are Table Talk and The WELL, the two classic and cherished forum communities at Salon.  These groups are interesting and different in that they are each generalist as a whole, with specific subsections and neighborhoods.    (Some people from each are Open Salon members, too) The forum communites are full of context because of the folders or conferences respectively, and because of systems to allow seamlessly catching up without missing anything unless you choose to.  People "drift" in conversational forum topics (as people love to do any time we talk), but there is a strong sense of context that is usually described as a sense of place.  If you are talking about pets in the books area, it has the context of books readers or writers talking about pets with their pals.  I like that.

To me,  context and continuity are hugely valuable!  One thing that has kept my participation in Open Salon light is that there is a real and rich community here, and I can only dilute my community attention so far.  Still, it's obvious this is a juicy, rich site not only for good writing but for strong affinities and growing relationships.  The good stuff. I worry about a light level of attention from me seeming aloof or clueless to those who are really involved here.

So what was my big experiment?  One of my talented beer-geek community friends, Brian Yaeger  is now the guest author at Inkwell on The WELL -- our two-week long interview/mini-residency we feature on the home page.  I'm cross-promoting in places I previously had never mixed it up. 

 Is it annoying or spammy to do this to my WELL pals or my craft beer community pals? Do my Open Salon pals have any interest in this obsessive concern with what kind of information and conversation goes where? 

(Or with Brian's book, or fine beer for that matter?)

I wonder what I'll learn.