Blogging (isn't over) has just begun...onto RSS

First, good work on the blogging section of class, I've read just about every post and I can see that almost all of you are following me on Twitter (I'm following you as well :-)

If you don't know what RSS is, you're about to get a pretty good lesson over the next 2 weeks. I've giving RSS two full weeks as it's important to get the concept, it has great implications for information management, AND because we can really use it for cool things later.

From this point on I will pretty much never look at your blogs...I'll be using Bloglines, an rss aggregator, to read your posts (it's actually how I read all your posts this week). With that said, I still encourage you to "play" with your blogs. Images, widgets, skins, etc. can all add to the "personal" side of your blog site.

One of the things that we've been doing over the first few weeks of class is to set up a lot of communication channels...IM, Blogs, Microblogs and now RSS are all ways that we're going to be able to communicate with each other...do you best to think of these tools for their "interactive" strength.

The most important thing that I took from the Brown and Duguid reading was the strength of the social network in the workplace. I remember the wonderful "teams" that I use to work with in the library, I especially loved it when I was "teamed" with someone on the reference desk who has the exact opposite skills that I did. We were able to learn a lot from each other and really come up with creative approaches to difficult questions.

To me, the "social network" is one of the biggest pieces of all these tools. Social Networking goes way beyond MySpace, Facebook, etc., the connections created in threaded discussions, in communities of bloggers, in IM'ing colleagues who are not near you all work to create a "network".

Through this class, each of us becomes "better" because of the work of all of us...example...there's no way we could cover the entirety of the blog software world in one class, but because of the work of everyone in the class, we should have a pretty good picture of some of the most important points...even more of this to come...