RSS and my memorial to Safari.

Since getting involved with Second Life I’ve found myself following a slew of blogs. I was staying with Safari because I really liked how it managed blogs. I did NOT like how Firefox dealt with blogs. Then, someone turned me on to Google Reader (Thanx, SR!). Well, once I found Google Reader, there was no need for me to stay with Safari anymore, so I have migrated to Firefox, which is a FAR better web browser, IMHO.

So now I have all of my email…every single account…forwarded to my Google Mail account (sorry.afk@gmail.com). I use Firefox for web, and Google Reader for my blogs. I feel like I’m much more in control of the data that is coming in and can better manage what I need to read and react to right away. Now all I have to do is get caught up from the backlog caused by a few weeks of madness both personally and at work.

If you are not familiar with RSS, what it is and what it does, I recommend you spend the next 3 ½ minutes and watch this video:
http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english
The folks over at Common Craft are amazing, I encourage you to hit up their site and check out the other great videos they have produced.

I’ve also recently discovered Twitter (thanks, again, SR). I like Twitter because it is limited – 160 characters on the web page and only 140 if you do it through your cell phone. That’s another thing I like about it, I can go through my contact list and select those for whom I want postings sent to me as a text message. Don’t try this at home without a good text message program as part of your cellular service – it can get rather costly!

I hope to try this out with my class in the fall, although it will not be a formal part of the class. In fact, I just re-wrote part of the syllabus to include “Web 2.0” items that will be optional, like FaceBook, MySpace, and Twitter (plus any others the students find and share.)

I hope to link up with them using my own accounts (which I’m in the process of setting up and will post here when I do). This will allow us to share both during the class and perhaps afterward. I’m not looking to do this as a “friend”, but as a part of their network. I’d be pleased if I could help students along as the move through college, even those who leave MSU. I recently had someone come back to me with a question even though she had transferred to another school.

So, what has come along new for you in the last few weeks or months that has been good, bad, or in between?