Despite my apparent reputation for being Mr. Hip-to-the-Scene Blogger Dude, I’m not exactly livin’ la Web 2.0 vida loca. I almost never blog about personal details of my life. I have a Facebook account, but I don’t do much with it. I killed my MySpace account after getting creeped out by “friend” invitations from 13-year-old girls, phone sex operators, phone sex operators pretending to be 13-year-old girls, 13-year-old girls pretending to be phone sex operators, and other combinations thereof. My Second Life name, Xeno Balderdash, pretty much sums up my my experiences to-date with SL. (I haven’t even bothered to install the client on my current computer.) I have never tried the World of Warcraft. The whole notion of Twitter frankly horrifies me. I sign up for lots of accounts for all sorts of social software sites when they first come out but pretty much abandon them all until I suddenly am reminded that I have an account with them as other people try to “friend” me. (The latest is Spock. I am suddenly getting a slew of messages from people who want to join my “trust network.” Folks, I’ll click the button to do the thing, but chances are good that I’m going to learn a lot more about Spock by watching you than you are by watching me. But hey, live long and prosper.)
Still, I have learned over time that I should be patient and not make snap judgments because I am often the last person to figure out the value of a new social tool. Heck, I thought blogging was a narcissistic waste of time when I first heard about it. So I try to watch other, smarter people and learn from them. As such, I have been lucky to have a few friends (both the Facebook kind and the real kind) who do the whole Web 2.0 “living out loud” thing very gracefully, where I actually feel enriched by the personal aspects of their lives that they make public. There’s an art to it, and I am beginning to think that art is worth learning.
So today I am making a baby step in that direction by making available my personal RSS feed. This is the very lightly filtered sum total of all the items in my RSS reader (which happens to be Google Reader). It is not filtered for e-learning and related topics; it’s whatever happens to be in reader and catching my personal attention from day to day. (At the moment, it’s a lot of wonky articles about United States politics and economics.) I basically apply the following criteria:
- It has to appear in my feed reader.
- I have to read the item (and if it’s only a sentence or two, I have to have clicked through to the web page).
- I have to not feel that reading it was a total waste of my time.
That’s it. I don’t have to agree with the article, or think it’s a great article or have it be about a particular topic. It’s everything in my reader that I read without regretting. Thanks to the magic of Google Reader and AJAX, it takes so little effort for me to share an item I read in my feeder that it’s worth my time to do it. And because I’m a freak for analysis, I’m running the feed through Feedburner to see (a) if anybody actually cares what I’m reading and (b) what the trends are in terms of overlap of interest, if any. And if you do find this valuable, please let me know why you find it valuable. I really do want to know.
Enjoy, I guess.
