Last week in class, we talked a lot of tech. Amazingly enough my students didn’t run screaming from the room. More on that in another blog.
But as a result, I didn’t get a chance to include just a bit more on social media. So here that bit is:

• To check your digital footprint try 123people.com. Use the usernames and real names that you put out there on the web. This site will search up lots of information. It is very revealing.

• Negative things abound on the web. Removing them is not an easy task. There are 2 methods of dealing with this: making sure enough good information outweighs the bad and asking authors to remove bad information. If these things don’t work, and the information must be removed, you have to seek professional help.

• Creative commons is a way to copyright your material on the web. Using this little graphic and link, you can tell your users what uses they have for your material. It is usable in pictures as well as text.

• We talked about namechk to help you see what accounts are out there, and whether or not certain name are taken.

• Twitter is a good way to interact with people through a few characters at a time. It seems to be useful in ‘backchannel’ conversations. It is the pulse of the web, somewhat

Social media will continue to grow, so I guess we are kind of stuck with it. I suggest we hang on and enjoy the ride.
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Last week we discussed a variety of social media tools. For any of you who know me, I have been a huge advocate of a variety  of tools. Often shouting about them vigorously from the rooftops of every platform (well only most of them).
One of my all time most useful is delicious. However, admittedly, I find myself not using it as much outside of classes. I have a few theories about that..
1) Bookmarks are now sharable. Most browsers now share bookmarks between them, permitting a pro-user such as myself to find the same bookmarks regardless of browser.
2) Bookmarks are easy to return to. Google has someone interfered with the need to have an online bookmark repository. With the ability to retrieve almost any relevant search result, the need for site and tools like delicious is minimized. Not like the old days, where either you wrote it down or it was LOST forever.
3) Tagging is still not as familiar as folders. While the world has moved into using tags instead of the taxonomies of old, tagging is still presents a bit of a quandary. Like, how did I tag that link, is this for video, or audio, or did I tag it creative. And what if I need 2 words, did I use a hyphen or a underline? Without a tagging policy or strategy if you will, you will still not find your links.
4) Delicious is not friendly. Delicious doesn’t provide a whole host of easy tools to integrate it into your life. Sure there are some developers out there, making widgets, gadgets and the like. And of course you can add a bookmark while on Mars, but the aggregation of links to a website or across a tag, still requires programming. So, less Delicious users have these nice widgets proudly displayed for all to see on their sites.
5) Delicious descriptions. So what are these for, and how do you craft them. Is this a synopsis, an abstract. How deeply do I have to comment this fella for it to be recognizable. I’m still not sure these comments help, but the box is there.
So, there you have it. Lots of reasons not to use online bookmarking in your everyday life. And truthfully, only one really compelling reason to do so.
Sharing. How else can you show the world the things you read and see and find interesting. Well I guess you go through the world until you have that Ah-Ha moment. One day my colleague comes to work after a night of ‘StumbledUpon’ and professes his love of this or that website. Then I say to him, well send it to me. And he says, well I didn’t save it. I just read it. What! I say, why don’t you use Delicious? Hmm.. He says. I guess I never thought of that.
Perhaps that is the point. If you have Delicious you don’t have to think of it,  because the SHARING part is taken care of. For you and all your friends out there looking at that awesome website, together.
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Making a long story short (blog.joyrobinson.com), I have shifted my wiki to Google sites. The url is currently wiki.joyrobinson.com.
The site is perking along, I am still adding things. Next up on the list is to be able to change the pointing for website to go to the actual class. Like for example nms520 will have a url like nms520.courses.joyrobinson.com. While not difficult, I still need to get this done. With only one week left to get the job done, I guess I should stop typing here and get back to work.
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After deciding to use wikkawiki, I have finally got it uploaded. I had some drama over the .htaccess file and the way the pages are setup at the webserver and what not. (It firmly reminds me why I have a mac..lol) BUT…

Now its up and its ugly; but I can make pages and add content. Tomorrow users, accounts, categories, oh yeah and maybe a menu bar. Then next I conquer the world

Oh, and I forgot to mention, its in the wrong directory. But I figure some more smoozing with .htaccess and no one will be the wiser.
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