After multiple talks with Jason Strate (blog|twitter) and Denny Cherry (blog|twitter) about how they are working on automating more of their blogging and social media interactions, I’m going down that road… a little ways.

The first thing that I’m trying out is Pocket. It’s a way to capture web sites that you want to read later. You don’t want to have to try to manage book marks in your browser. They all suck (and Google Chrome on the Mac sucks even worse) in this task. So this app lets you quickly mark a site and tag it for reading later. Further, you have an account that you can access from multiple devices. I’m already trying out two different readers that will work with Pocket on the Surface and I already have one for the phone. (yes, still using the Surface, more blog posts coming).

This then leads to IFTTT, or If This Then That. It’s a way to automate some of the interactions of things you do on the internet. I’m just getting started. I just set up my first trigger to post any articles I’ve read from Pocket to my Facebook account with a link. It was insanely, stupidly simple. Oh boy! More stuff to come as soon as I can find more things to do with this. Oooh, there are suggested triggers, such as RSS feeds to Pocket. Oh yeah, this is dangerous, slick and cool. Stand back.

I’m also looking at HootSuite. I’ve already been using automating a Facebook post and a Tweet when I post to my blog. But, it’s just the one time. You know how any one Tweet can get lost in your Twitter stream. So, maybe a few (a very few, I refuse to become a spam engine) extra tweets after a blog post would be useful. The basic setup there is quite simple, but management looks like a bear. I’ll have to see if IFTTT can help there. Ah, there it is, a nice easy way to link an RSS feed to accounts. Can’t do all accounts at once without moving to the paid service. I’ll have to wait to see if I need that.

All experiments are starting out on Facebook, primarily because I care the least about my Facebook account. I do care about G+ and Twitter. These seem to have a lot more professional interactions.

As I see more possibilities here, I’ll share them.