1. Twitter/Tweetdeck - I grouped these two together because my use of Twitter is non-existent without Tweetdeck. Twitter has gone from a second thought to the first thing I open at work in the morning. In fact, I open my Twitter account and scan it before I open e-mail. I never thought when I first started using Twitter that it would have this profound an effect, but it does.

2. WordPress - Without WordPress, there would be no blog(s) for me. In fact, I chose to buy and host on my own because of the ease of installing WordPress. Certainly I could've continued with the free hosting at Edublogs, or moved to a Blogspot location, but for me it only seemed logical to roll my own.

3. Google Search - Yes, I'm a bit wary of the monolithic Google  and the amount of information they can potentially know about me. Of course, I'll trade what they know about me for the wealth of information that is available. Sure, it's becoming second nature that the first result will probably be the best one for me - which will be an issue once that second nature is unquestioned. Until then, and not only because I used to teach searching techniques, Google Search is crucial.

4. bit.ly - Again, if you follow my Twitter stream (@dietsociety) you'll know that I use this shortening service exclusively. I like that I can know something about the people who click on the links, and it often leads me to new people I choose to follow (if I'm not already).

5. Scribd - I can't imagine that this service, where you can read books online, won't be affected by the iPad, Kindle and other portable e-book readers. Still, lots of good information out there.

6. Flickr - I do maintain only one stream of photos - mostly for the live music I've seen and been lucky enough to get a workable photo at. My wife uses it as a dumping ground for all things - so I leave the photos of my life over there. Plus she's much more talented than me.

7. Yahoo Mail / Gmail - Does this count as a Web 2.0 tool? I'm a chronic checker of e-mail - so much so I forget to check the one associated with my home ISP. I've had my Yahoo mail account for just under a decade... so by default I guess it's not Web 2.0... maybe Web 1.5?

8. LMS - As a user I've used Blackboard, Desire2Learn, WebCT 4, Moodle, FirstClass and Sakai. As an instructor I've used Desire2Learn, FirstClass and WebCT. I've also had administrative powers for most of those systems at one point or another. I don't think a day goes by that I don't login to one of these systems.

9. Wikipedia / Media Wiki - I used this in my teaching, and often refer to it as a starting point for inquiry.

10. Facebook - Occasionally I use Facebook to keep up on my family's coming and goings, as well as my friends. Having friends in several different cities across the world - Facebook makes sense. Otherwise, I'm not interested in Farmville or any other Mechanical Turk work.

Topsy: New-ish Twitter search engine that provides a ranking of your popular tweets, and attempts to navigate the network of links between your tweets, retweets and more. I think we'll see many more of these sorts of popularity tools for Twitter pop up over this year as the general public tries to make sense of it.

Compare My Docs: I can see the plagiarism checking benefits for this (by comparing source material to essays) in addition to the versioning comparison that the site is aiming at. Sure, Turnitin is more robust, but it's also a pay-to-play service.

WordPress Opens Up in an effort to improve their overall design and user experience. I never really found WP to be that bad, although at times I can see how user experience can be improved. A good idea to outsource this to the crowd, we'll see the results fairly soon I suspect.

1. The 365/10 project. On Flickr, take a photograph everyday and post it with the 365/10 tag. I'd go one further to geo-tag it and give it descriptive tags to help people find it.

2. The Dailyshoot is along the same idea, shoot something every day/week, but this time grouped around a theme. It goes one further to post a link via Twitter. Sometimes having someone give you constraints is a good way to focus on technique rather than finding something interesting to shoot.

3. Digital Photography Challenge is another photograph on a theme challenge, but it's also a contest where you can vote on best shots.

4. Running From Camera is something Alec Couros posted on Twitter moments ago, but a cool task for a different shot. Of course, looking through the entries, some of them are composed very similarly. I wonder if you could work within the constraints of "running away" but shooting on a diagonal? Would the picture still work?

5. In addition to shooting more, critique more. Be very critical and selective about shooting and framing. Be reflective in your practice, think about what you could do to improve your shot selection. If you can't come up with what you can do to improve your shots, review the basic theories that govern design, and choose one to work with exclusively.

Mark Gammon: what appears as "geek culture" now will be "culture" before long.. already underway #smchat

Me: @markgammon isn't that always the way with culture though? #smchat

Mark: @dietsociety exactly my point. tech increasingly IS culture, differentiation of tech and cult is lessening #smchat

Me: @markgammon hmmm I wonder if that means those who shun tech. will become counter-cultural by default. What about "primitive" cult.? #smchat

Mark: @dietsociety think it will begin to look like that. mobile phone adoption is an example. used to shun users, now we shun non-users #smchat

I like the cellphone example, although I don't necessarily agree with it - cellphone use in some circles is still seen as rude, or frowned upon. And what about old technology, it's almost as if old technology is looked upon as worse than having no technology. As if there's an explanation for not having technology, but not for not keeping up with the latest. I remember in 2003, just as flip phones became more popular I still had a brick of a cellphone (Nokia 5170 I recall). I got some flak for it, but I wasn't going to throw away a perfectly good phone (with a good phone number too!). Eventually I retired it because it was frankly embarrassing to use it in public. It's interesting to look back at the reasons for rejecting the old phone... not because it didn't work (it actually worked a lot better than my follow up phone), but because as a "techie" it would tarnish my image to be carrying around last year's technology. This disposability of an item for vanity is disturbing to me, as I had never thought that I was that sort of guy. Guess I am. I just wonder if people with last year's models are destined to be second (or third) class citizens.

I mean, I just threw out a pack of Zip disks that went with my external Zip Drive from a decade ago when I was running a Mac PPC 6100/66. I still had the drive, just no SCSI cable to connect to, nor any way to read the information on the disks as I've long since donated any computer that might've had Mac OS 9. What have I lost that I can't recover? Anything of importance? Probably. But I couldn't even begin to think about it. Makes paper seem a bit more appealing though doesn't it? As long as we are able to read, paper will be useful.

What does this mean for so-called primitive cultures, who reject or avoid technology? We already know that cultures that avoid technology are dwindling in numbers. Does that mean that progress is overwriting them? What happens to their memory when no one can speak for them because so few things about them are recorded?

Was interesting to see this post about the future from The Working Guy at Yahoo (and a similar one by the boob who wrote about how people are getting dumber), who contends that kids who use high-tech social media are lost in face-to-face relationships. Well, he hedges his bet with saying "may be lost..." but it's the same scare tactic from media. Your kids are going to be turned into mindless zombies incapable of any emotion or thought, or will be unable to function in the "real world". What's really interesting is that the notion at the end of the Working Guy article where the author states that the time it takes to study this stuff is too long for the published results to be relevant. Really? Guess you should tell that to the McArthur Foundation or perhaps the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Instead of scare-mongering, perhaps the inverse is what we should be looking at? Instead of social zombies, ready to be strafed like some Resident Evil game, we should look at what is being enhanced.

Another line in the article got my attention (and at 8:30 AM, that's a bit of a feat) was the tie-in to work environments. Well, again, instead of the negative side, maybe this is a push to create a community of telecommuters. Lots of people have been pushing this idea, and while I'm not in favour of having my work with me all the time, there are tangible benefits environmentally and economically. The continuous partial attention is something that work has forced on us anyways, as more work gets put on less workers, something has to give. Also, the fact that work has become less of a defining role on who we are as an entity, another benefit of social media, in my opinion, will give less importance to work as a whole. Never mind that many workers feel undervalued in their jobs and at the end of every pay period.

I'm also seeing a lot of mainstream media talking about this continuous partial attention and I think this Social Media boom is in for a bust soon. We are becoming saturated with social media, ways to connect, and people are becoming more and more selective with which products they choose to use because they are feeling this pressure. It seems that people are paying attention to is based on the network that their connections are connected to.  Sure, that's a fairly simple observation to make, but the deeper meaning is that new and innovative products, like Twitter say, have to provide something new and tangibly innovative to users or it's going to struggle. I think a lot of the skepticism around Twitter is because it doesn't do anything new, except truncate context and provide more immediate access to people. Truncating context, an interesting phenomenon sure, but may be not all that useful to the end user.

Howard Rheingold makes a good point (as he almost always does) in this video about attention and multitasking. Yes, I linked it, as I wonder about the context of embedded links (another post I'm sure). He states that everyone already multitasks and pays attention, more importantly though, we pay attention to what we think is important. That decision making process is a critical thinking process, and if we want people to pay attention, we have to give them an indisputable reason to do that.

So where does that leave us?

First off, I've been talking theoretically about aesthetics a lot. That probably rankles people a little, because theory is useless without practice. Digital photos are an easy way to add a professional look to a text-heavy space. If you are composing photographs, there are lots of tutorials out there to compose a better picture. Here's a particularly good, short and sweet, ten steps to creating a superior photograph. It's not in depth, but a good start if you have no idea where to begin with shooting photos.

Secondly, this idea that Twitter is not being adopted by teens or  Twitter is not being adopted by GenY. Well, the data in this report is really skewed - not too many 2-8 year olds on social media. And then to have the age ranges as 2-24, 25- 54, 55+ seems a little skewed. Having 24 year olds be grouped in with teens almost defies the normal definition of teens. I suppose the idea that Twitter benefits from celebrity tweets or Iran elections is an interesting one as this signals a shift away from corporate news broadcasting (which also might explain a further shift to entertainment from news channels) and to authentic reporting from people in the area. With Twitter looking to add geotagging, this will be even easier to do in the future. Of course, we've all heard about Gen Y using shows like The Daily Show as a primary news source. I'm considered Gen X, and I tend to use The Daily Show as a primary news source as I pretty much despise CNN and Fox News. CBC sometimes gets some consideration, but I don't really gravitate towards dry delivery. I like a smartass approach. People raise this idea as some sort of spectre of the next generation being unable to discern fact from fiction, but I find this generally to be untrue. Gen Y, like all other generational groups get humour and sarcasm.

Third point, Pew Internet released a study about the Internet use of the different generations. I like that the Generations are better defined than the Twitter study earlier, but the conclusion that older generations are "dominant" in Internet use, seems like a no-brainer. Older generations have disposable income and use this stuff for work, so our Internet use will be higher. While much of education is pushing towards online activities, in my experience the elementary schools are still using computers in a way that treats them as a separate course. I do know there are forward thinking teachers, out there, just not at my daughter's school.

I've skimmed it, and really need to give a once over at least one more time. It's a well thought out, balanced critique of Twitter. On the one hand we have this tool that's seemingly perfect for broadcasting, yet people still insist on having conversations! Jenkins point about the two parts of Twitter, the Here It Is/Here I Am components, seem right. Although, it seems right for an individual - how does a business or organization fit in? It's an interesting thing to ponder.

We've seen with MySpace that genuine existence and experience is a commodity that you can't overvalue. People left MySpace when things got too business-like, and felt like a burden to login. We're starting to see this with Twitter as well, where spam/pornobots are becoming slightly more sophisticated and actually making themselves look like they possibly could be humans. I don't mind deleting or not following a couple of people a day, but the bigger players in the Twitterverse certainly get more of this sort of action. At what point does logging into Twitter become a burden? More importantly, what businesses will be successful in using Twitter, and which ones are going to bully you with endless advertising?

I find those ideas interesting because I'm stumped as to how I would answer because most of the videos I see come from social networking sites or Twitter... my experience online is not so binary. How does multitasking fit in?

Also, I was hoping that the study would've looked at what kinds of videos (well, not in depth, I suppose those sorts of videos could be classified as "entertainment" I suppose) were viewed: humourous, educational, entertainment, etc

Of course, the study was slanted towards the looking at internet vs. TV, which isn't a shock. Similar to looking at TV vs. Radio in the mid to late 50's.

Same sort of thing with MediaWiki, when I posted about my problems with an old install (which I also posted about here) they were quick to connect. Clearly, Web 2.0+ companies are paying attention. Facebook responded to the concerns over privacy which spread quickly through blogs and twitter. It will be interesting to see if older models of business are paying attention as well. I suspect the ones that are will be better able to survive the seismic shifts we're still going to see before things settle down again (if they ever settle down again).