It's about that time of year where I have enough to do that I need to do some serious procrastinating and try all those little applications and view all those sites I've been reading and hearing about for the past few months.
Although I call it procrastination, it is in fact just my prioritizing things I should do now with after things I could do later; like marking! I've been a little under the weather so I'll use that as an excuse for the task shuffle.
Just before Christmas I applied to be a presenter at the BC Science and Teachers Association to talk about Utilizing Social Networking in Professional and Personal Context. It has always been something I tinker with as I blogged about last October. Well that "social networking system", or eco-system as I call it, has worked quite well. I haven't really been confident enough to shout from the roof tops that I have all these profiles, but I'm getting closer to advertising it more publicly. Many of the people I'm surrounded by haven't really caught on to the whole social networking thing. They think it's cool, but haven't worked it into their daily schedule. Of course if you don't have a community of people sharing these tools with you then the house of cards comes crashing down. Anyway I'm looking forward to presenting. It's Session A on April 25th from 10:30 to 11:30 at the Grand Okanagan Resort.
Over the past couple of days I've done some playing around with Twitter, FriendFeed, a Twitter client TWhirl, and then integrating all these so my online activities can viewed in my Facebook profile. Friendfeed was great find since it allows you to see a user's activity from 28 different social networking sites. If they don't have a friendfeed account then you can create an imaginary one. Very cool. The Twitter thing...well...as they say, it is one of those things that sounds useless, but once you start using it and build up some followers, could be highly addictive. I'm finding I'm gaining some information that I wouldn't otherwise have obtained via my usual RSS feeds. However it is a trick to figure out the best platform or method to view and collect the information in one's personal network. For instance, do you want to see it summarized in an e-mail, view it from within facebook, or within your RSS Aggregator? I have all three going right now and will monitor to see which one works best for me. By the same token, if friendfeed is aggregating all the activity for you then you probably don't need to monitor the individual sources. Aggregating, aggregating and more aggregating. The next step I would love to see is an intelligent way of minimizing duplicity of content.
