Twitter

Honestly, I find Twitter completely pretentious. But, the majority of what I've seen and heard of twitter is from the Celebrity (far)side, so maybe an animosity unfounded.

I see how it is part of a "Social Media Revolution" and is becoming vital in how our society shares a information, personal, business or otherwise.

In my present personal life Twitter would serve no purpose, so I chose not to join.

LibraryThing

I created an account with LibraryThing.com:
http://www.librarything.com/home/crystalmay

I have added a selection of titles, but haven't explored much more than that. I find the website a bit cluttered and distracting, but signing up for an account was extremely easy.

I like the idea that this will keep track of what I'm reading, 'cause I usually have a hard time remembering titles...handy for reader's advisory when your mind's gone blank!

I'm excited to explore others' recommendations and integrate LibraryThing as a useful resource both at work and for personal use.

Online Productivity Tools

I signed up for the Google Calendar(http://www.google.com/calendar/).
Google Calendar was easy to sign up for and seems pretty straight forward, but I don't have a use for such a tool.

Flickr & Youtube

I set up a Flickr account which was super easy since Flicker is part of the Yahoo! network. I found a group which peaked my interest:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/lovemastiffs/

I added a few pictures that I happened to have saved on the ol' work computer of my dog from lord knows what!

Very simple and easy to use, but I primarily use facebook as my vehicle for sharing photos.

Youtube is great for viewing concert footage funny vids, pretty much anything you can think of , my daughter watches music videos on it all the time - it's like her own personal request show!

RSS

I created a Blogline account so as to better understand the process, and it is fairly straight forward, pretty much the same as adding an account to follow through Blogger.

For some reason it did not accept the http://www.cbc.ca/calgary website, stating:

No feeds were found. Please verify that the website publishes an RSS feed

But when I clicked on the RSS feed on the CBC website I was successful in adding it into the favorites/feeds section of my computer - which I didn't even know existed!

I have been following blog feeds though our own Blogger accounts, so I suppose that Bloglines would be convenient for those who do not maintain their own blog.

Google

I consider myself fairly familiar with most of google's tools but one I have never tried is Google translate.

I entered in a phrase in french :

ouin dire que le monde ce calise ben des familles....c'est la on voie il faudrait quesment l'heurre faire une pipe pour pouvoir gagné....Un jeunne c'est ben plus inportemp qu'un histoire de famille.

and selected it to be translated to english :

wah tell the world that bin Calise family .... it's the way it should be a heurre quesment the pipe to be won .... A jeunne bin is more than inportemp Family History .

sooo...not so clear really! Therefore I probably would NOT recommend Google translate for phrase translating, but maybe for single word only.

Coincidence?

One of todays top news articles on on http://ca.yahoo.com/

checkout the title!

6 Career-Killing Facebook Mistakes

http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/personal-finance/article/forbes/1517/6-career-killing-facebook-mistakes

hmmmmm.

Facebook

First came Friendster, and then Myspace and until the next best thing - facebook it is!

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=11584547&id=880230631#!/crystal.audia?ref=profile

Facebook is both useful AND timewaster!

It is pretty much the only way I am able to stay in contact with friends and family, and if you want to see any pictures of my children, you have to have a facebook account or else you're pretty much outta luck!

WikiWizard?!

I feel like such a smartypants!
I just added information about Kijiji.ca on Wikipedia!
Definitely way easier than I was anticipating, although it did take me some time to find an article that I could add to, and I never came across any potential editing.

I'll probably view Wikipedia with a much more scrutinizing eye now that I'm a contributor! Ha!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kijiji

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us was implemented while I was on Maternity leave last year, and since my return I just haven't got it, add it to my to do list!

I find Delicious very busy and confusing to navigate, especially when compared with our former Best Web Sites. I'm sure with time it too will become second nature.

I did like that you can make a portable favorites - quite handy, so I made my own:

http://delicious.com/audia_c

I think I'm getting the hang of this!

Blogging has always seemed very intimidating and is one of the more daunting tasks of the CPL 2.0 initiative.
In the past I've viewed blogging as a venue for those with the gift of creative writing skills or some such thing, but blogs are becoming a little less overwhelming now that I've familiarized myself a little...perhaps a new obsession really - move over Facebook!