Thing #12: Facebook, or How I Learned to Love Throwing Sheep

Facebook is reputed to be the social networking tool of the young and hip, but most of the Facebook users I know are middle-aged like me. In Facebook, as in the rest of life, people of similar age and interests tend to clump together, and so it is that without much active effort I have accumulated a gaggle of Facebook friends in their 30's, 40's, and 50's, who are interested in books, our families, and assorted random goofiness.

Actually I have two Facebook pages-- a personal one and a professional one. I set up the professional page so I could start a Facebook group for teens interested in library events and updates.

I set up the personal page so I could throw sheep at my friends.

Seriously. Most of my Facebook friends--the ones who are actual, you know, FRIENDS, but also some of those who are friends mainly in that we have (here it goes, noun-into-verb alert, wait for it...wait for it...) FRIENDED each other on Facebook--anyway, most of those people who I connected with because our our deep interest in words, books, deep thoughts about life, etc.--well, mainly what we do on Facebook is throw sheep at each other, via a silly little Facebook application called SuperPoke.

I know, I know, you can do all kinds of useful things on Facebook, like sending out mass invitations and updates, and letting people know about your recent blog posts, and putting up photos of your family and friends, and all that cool stuff.

But really you can do much of that stuff via e-mail and blog posts and such, while there is no comparable substitute for a good sheep-throwing free-for-all. And when you get tired of throwing sheep, there are lots of variants, like sending flowers, tripping peole, and even seasonal options such as throwing pumpkin pies, throwing Santa, and throwing Hillary Clinton. It's fun, builds community, and is highly theraputic, too.

So, duck! (Baaaaaaaa!)

Thing #11: Technorati

Maybe it's the season sneaking up on me, but for some reason I have the urge to sing the word "Technorati" to the tune of the Hallelujah chorus:

TECH-no-rati!
TECH-no-rati!
Technorati! Technorati!
Tech-NO-ra-TI!

No? Okay, maybe not.

So, as suggested, I checked out Technorati and learned more about how tags work. As I've mentioned before, I'm a terrible and pathetic tagger, and really have mixed feelings about tagging as a useful tool on a large scale; the universe of natural language is just too big and varied.

But I had fun looking at Technorati's tag clouds, and checking out what's popular and rising these days. Seems to me that Technorati would be an extremely useful tool for writers or pundits who want to keep their finger on the pulse of what's being talked about, and it is helpful if you want to see who's linked to your blog or website lately (I did a few vanity searches and found that some surprising people have linked to a couple of things I've written, so that was neat).

As suggested, I did try searching on "Learning 2.0", and found 7,007 posts that mentioned the term, but only 531 with the "Learning 2.0" tag. Which suggests that many other people are just as lazy about tagging as I am. Good to know!

Thing #10: Mmm, Delicious!

image of chocolates courtesy of freefoto.com

Del.icio.us is yet another one of those things I've been hearing about for years and have finally gotten to explore. And it is, indeed, as cool as everyone said. It's like a portable bookmark list! That you can add to quickly and easily and without even hardly breaking stride, as you surf and slide around the Internet!

Only a couple of problems:

1. Tagging. Tagging is my bete noire. In my non-work online life I never remember to tag: not blog posts, not photos, not gmail messages, not LibraryThing books. This means that when I search for something (say, in my formidable backlog of old gmail messages on my personal email account) I just have to try to remember what words I might have used in the subject heading or contents of the message, and look under those. Sometimes that works great, sometimes not, sometimes it works but I have to sift through pages and pages of results to find what I'm looking for.

I'm guessing it will be the same on del.icio.us, when and if I accumulate a sizeable list of bookmarks: I won't remember to tag, so they'll just be all jumbled, like the papers on my desk, and I'll have to sift and sort and guess to find what I want.

2. Del.icio.us button. This button is part of what makes del.icio.us so cool, because you don't have to stop and cut and paste to add a site to your del.icio.us account: just see a site you like, click, and voila! it's added. Only problem is, the button isn't available on shared computers (like the NVDPL computers), so some of the advantage of using del.icio.us is nullified when I'm using it at work, since in order to add a site I either have to stop, open the del.icio.us site in another window, and then cut and paste and click to add a new site to my account, or else have the forethought to just keep the del.icio.us site open in a separate window whenever I'm on the Internet.

Ah, well; nothing's perfect. And the road to ultimate online transparency is ever strewn with rocks and stones and snares.

In the meantime, the name of this application is making me hungry for dinner. Mmm... dinner!