If your idea of microblogging isn’t limited to Facebook and Twitter, Identi.ca includes a “group” membership mechanism through which you can more easily follow the kinds of notices that interest you than is possible on Twitter.

Once you join a group, all of the Identi.ca posts that include that group’s identifying tag, a word with an exclamation point before it — as in !Debian, will be included in your regular Identi.ca stream. It’s a great way to both read posts that interest you and to discover other people to follow who you might not have otherwise known about.

By the way, I have Identi.ca feeding Twitter (you can’t do it the other way around), so I’m on both services. It’s complicated enough that I have one source of news feeding Ping.fm, which in turn feeds Twitter, and then Identi.ca and Facebook.

But I use Identi.ca more than any of the others: It’s full of open-source-friendly people.

To see what Debian people are talking about on identi.ca, look at http://identi.ca/group/debian.

All you need to do, once you’re on identi.ca, is put a “bang” (or exclamation point, if you will) in front of the word that names your group.

Like this: !Debian

Word that the copyright/trademark issues that have had Debian renaming Firefox as Iceweasel might be resolved means that some day new users won’t be confused by a lack of Firefox and Thunderbird and the substitution of Iceweasel and Icedove (not to mention Iceape, Iceowl and whatever others I can’t remember).

I distinctly remember being puzzled when I ran my first Linux live CD, Knoppix, in late 2006. It took me a while before I figured out that Iceweasel looked and acted just like Firefox ...