Monday, June 29, 2009

Technorati: Thing #14 part 1

I'll be doing a more involved post on Technorati in Part 2 of my Thing #14 post. This post is just to allow me to claim my blog on Technorati by publishing this line of code on my blog's front page.

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Lovely.

Thing # 13 Bookmarks and Tagging

Tagging is one of those things that seems inconvenient and inefficient at first, but can save you lots and lots of time as you accumulate more tags and more things that have tags.

I'll admit, I was a little resistant to Thing #13 as written because I had used Deli.cio.us in the past and discarded it in favor of FoxMarks (now Xmarks) as a central bookmarking solution. Now that Xmarks supports Safari as well as Firefox and also syncs your passwords, I was even more loathe to change my bookmarking. And much of what I got by tagging pages and organizing them through Deli.cio.us I found more comfortable using Evernote.

I did join Diigo, but have not been using it. I did subscribe to the Diigo in Education group and get regular email updates from the group (because you can never get enough email, after all) which are interesting and could be useful, but overall, I was not set afire by the annotation possibilities and the toolbar. The toolbar seemed just to clutter up my browsing experience and I think that I would be more appreciative of the annotation and sharing possibilities in Diigo if I were classroom teacher. Who knows, I may find a way it works for me yet.

Here's one of those things about Web 2.0. There are lots of tools and lots of possibilities and a multitude of ways to get from here to there. That's a good thing if you are looking to find just the right tool for you and your way of doing things. It can be frustrating if you want the whole world to be using the same tool you use.

Once I was driving to local hotspot with a friend who voiced her surprise at the route I was taking. I responded in all sincerity, "I'm sure there are other ways to get there." I was speaking in earnest, blissfully unaware of the arrogance of my tone until I heard it come out of my mouth. We were in a good and silly mood, so we both just started laughing about how we all think our way of "getting there" has some inherent superiority. It's good to remember as we wend our way through "the Internets" that there are almost always other ways to get where we are going.

Back to Blogging, Back to 23 Things

At the end of the school year, when I had failed to complete the 23 things (oh the shame), I made a promise to myself that I would finish over the summer. Somehow I still hold onto the image of summer as a slow period of rest and restoration in my head, even though as Technology Director, summer is one of the busiest times of year for my department.

But I still want to finish those 23 things before all the other staff comes back and I find that I am still behind.

Mostly it is just a block. I have actually done most of these "things." I just have to blog about them. I just have to reflect.

So. Notice given. I'm back