While I was on my little vacation away from this site, I took the time to go back to the original philosophy this site embraced at its inception, and looked hard and long at what the current state of things were in my life. My living space is clean and orderly (or as orderly as it's going to get until I perfect that pocket dimension I've been devising), I've acquired nothing I've not needed or truly wanted to clutter up the rooms here, and I've gotten rid of everything I don't see myself using in the near future.

This left me looking at my on-line presence, and what I've accumulated over the past few months. By hook or by crook, I cannot avoid having an internet footprint, and given what I do for a living, it would be impossible (if not detrimental) to erase said presence or any of the identities associated with my endeavors. However, there was one aspect of existing on-line that I never really looked at, and that was in social networking.

Between Facebook, Twitter, MySpace (which was the easiest to clean up), Digg, Reddit, and a host of other sites to which I belong, my presence was scattered, inconsistent, and full of bookmarks, applications, and "friends" - many of which I could not account for. So, I took some time and went into each profile to trim things down a bit.

As stated, MySpace was the easiest. All that involved was deleting my account. With Twitter, I went in with the philosophy that if (with few exceptions) people I followed were either not following me back, or seemed to be "dead users" then I would disengage in following them. Facebook, while certainly the most "living" of the social networking sites, was also the hardest to clean out. I uninstalled the various Facebook applications I'd not used and found as just plain intrusive. In looking at my "friends" list, I had to make some hard and tough decisions. Again, with exception, if I'd not interacted with these people in the past six months, had never actually met them in one form or another, or if they'd not been "present" in a long time, then they were removed. I did give notice ahead of time, to head off any potential fallout from streamlining things in my world. The other sites really had no bearing on my world, save for when I was looking for interesting topics to research or was promoting something from this site.

Finally, and probably the most tedious, was sifting through all of the sites I'd bookmarked over the past six months, deciding if I really wanted them, if I was going to use the bookmarked sites or the information they imparted, or if I could delete them for good. It wasn't the decision making process or attachment I had to the links that made it difficult, it was the sheer volume.

Ultimately, after a full weekend, my on-line experience was free of clutter, and I could begin the process anew of acquiring information for the sake of not liking unknowns to remain unsolved in my world.