Tuesday, July 01, 2008

21 lunges continued...

Finally returned to work after a long illness and several bouts of surgery. What was initially a personal blog has turned into a professional one, but the beauty of blogging is that one can delete entries when no longer required.

Having played with all the various delights on the 21 lunges up to number 6 - Social Networking, I thought it would be a good time to look at a few of the earlier lunges.

Podcasts are all well and good, but in a time-poor world who can listen to everything of interest? The intriguing aspect for me with podcasts is which player pops up - Quicktime or Windows Media Player. At home it tends to be Media Player as I've standardised with this on my PC.

RSS feeds are familiar from home use, however I set up Google Reader at work and added Yasmin Dineen's blog, and an ABC and The Age news feed. There are too few hours in the day to pursue all the possibilities, and life exists beyond the keyboard.

A useful item is http://del.icio.us for online bookmarks. Unfortunately because of the restrictions on installing software on our work PCs this can't be fully utilised, however it is a powerful bookmarking tool with features I've only begun to explore. The Facebook integration is interesting, and provides a glimpse of future online communication and information sharing.

Which leads me to Social Networking. Ah Facebook! Is it the end of civilisation as we know it, or the greatest development in communications technology in human history? Probably the answer lies in between. About 3 years ago I decided to check out MySpace, but found it to be of little interest to me. In 2007 I thought I'd have a look at Facebook and found something completely different. The ability to form interest groups and update activities is FB's great advantage as a communication tool. The news feed allows one to keep up to date with various activities, and the instant messaging of The Wall is a quick and simple alternative to email. Just don't become addicted to the time-wasting pursuits, silly quizzes, and Scrabulous and you'll be fine! Well, maybe Scrabulous, as long as you let me win! I created a group for Document Services which now has the huge total of 4 members (thanks guys, you know who you are).

I've kept the MySpace account as the blog is superior to Facebook's offerings, but I've not bothered to make "Friends" and have only responded to a couple of "friend" requests. The contrast with FB is striking, as a great number of people I know from the Melbourne (and international) poetry world are active users. Younger poets and musicians in particular use it matter-of-factly for routine socialising.

A type of offshoot of Facebook is Twitter, which develops and expands on FB's Status Updates. Ideal for the Generation Y racing around town being very social. I started an account, but find I have no need for it.

Still struggling to find a good wiki site for creating a DS wiki. I've found the creation of pages cumbersome, and a 'regular' website in most cases a better option. Nevertheless, the collaborative aspect of wiki makes the pursuit worthwhile and I'll persist.

To be continued...

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