It's a Conversation!

7 Reasons People Give For Not Using Twitter And Why They Can All Be Rebuffed With The Phrase: It's a Conversation

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The Downside of Social Networking

During the More Things on a Stick program, one of our projects required that we explore sites that let you make scrapbook pages, like those applications Scrapblog or Smilebox.

I discovered it was rather fun to make scrapbook pages, but did require some planning in advance. You need to have a selection of photographs, a theme, and some doodads for embellishment. I used both Smilebox and Scrapblog to produce projects. While exploring Scrapblog, I was "friended" by an obviously talented person who kindly offered encouragement and advice. I've been too busy to go back and do any more pages lately, but have received notices of new pages made by friends. The notice I got today made me go look at the page which was posted yesterday. I was dismayed and horrified by the necessity for her post which I have included below. Since I've seen the same kind of snarky comments on some of the blogs I read, I understand the reason for her direct address to this kind of snarkiness. It is an unfortunate downside to social networking that, thankfully, happens less frequently than sharing expertise and admiration for people's efforts. It seems there always has to be one rotten apple in the basket. I admire this "friend's" direct approach in confronting her snide critic.

Thing 41 Mashup Your Life

I tried out a number of different aggregators. The one I use the most and find helpful is Friendfeed. I added my Friendfeed badge to the sidebar. You can see most of my web2.0 affiliations are added to it.

What I like about it is that you can be as active or inactive as you like on Friendfeed. It's like Twitter expanded. You can chose to be part of the conversation, or just be solitary when you want to. Like Twitter, what gives it value is the people you follow. I've learned a lot of things just by seeing what those I follow are interested in. It's sometimes led me in unexpected directions. It's definitely expanded my interests and my world. I use it more for professional interests. Facebook is for my closer contacts.

Thing 37 Photo Tales

I skipped way ahead to do some fun stuff. I love photographs or pictures and words put together. Animoto is a very fun application to use and easy as well. And they keep making it more versatile. You can see a number of things I did with Animoto by looking at some of my blog posts from late 2008.

I recently upgraded to a Flickr Pro account as Flickr is so convenient to use for sharing photos and integrates well with other social media applications. I added Flickr to my Facebook application, but find that even so it sometimes takes as much as two weeks for my uploads to Flickr to post to my Facebook account. But they do eventually get there. If you want to share in real time, though, it's best to load directly to your Facebook photo albums.

I added Picasa to my computer to manage photos and find it very useful and easy to use. Did you know that all the images you post to your Blogger blog can be found in your online Picasa album? I didn't, but found out in the course of using Blogger that this is true. How cool is that?

I've used Photobucket and Picnik as well since they integrate with some of the Web2.0 apps that Flickr or Picasa don't. There's room for all of them, but they all are user friendly.

I'll share one of my Animoto creations as a separate post, but I intend to do a lot more things with this thing.