It is and it isn’t. This weekend, I’ve gone back to several services that I had joined many months ago to check them out again. Namely ClipMarks, NewsVine and del.icio.us. The only one I had found useful at the time was ClipMarks, and it mainly for a storage place for things I found interesting on the Internet. One problem I had with these services was that I didn’t “get” them. They were interesting, but didn’t click for me at the time.
Now I think I get it. I’ve been posting items to all these services, and integrating the feeds and information back here into my blog. The interesting thing is I finally went from my “view” of the service to the front page again and found all the content from other users streaming in. That was the part I had been missing, these services (and others of course) are best consumed when you view all the incoming streams of information – not just our individual contributions.
There is the metaphor of my problem with technology. Ever since I’ve been interested in technology, I’ve worked hard to understand how things work, how the software works, how it interacts with other software/services/hardware. So much so that my career long ago had taken a turn to follow that – I’m a tech-geek to the core. What I failed to understand was how these services where intended to be used.
Well now that I’ve figured out the basics, I’m going to embrace them along with the rest of my Web 2.0 services that I use. Neat stuff, but I’ll keep working to understand how their used in new and better ways.
BTW, here are my pages at these sites:
