Dear “Friend” Who Posted a Naked Picture on my Facebook Wall,Sorry but I’ve had to delete your post on my wall. I appreciate the thought (even though you posted the same naked picture on all of your “friends” walls). It’s not that I have anything against nudity but it’s just not funny, and I can’t say it’s something I want my dad to see on my profile or my boss or my co-workers or a potential employer.
-Your “Friend” Lori

Have you ever thought about what all your social sites combined say about you? Do you care?

I am very aware that my online persona says a lot about me. With every blog post, every Bloglines subscription, every tweet, every del.icio.us tag I make a conscious choice. What does this say about me? Is this public or private? Which account does this belong to?

I’m glad that I’m not the only one who thinks before tweeting. Here’s a great post on Remarkablogger What Picture Do Your Social Media Activities Paint about You?

Does this sound like too much work? It’s really not. Both Bloglines and del.icio.us allow you to mark posts as private. There are also tools like Meebo and twhirl that let you manage multiple IM and Twitter accounts.

Many employers Google search candidates before hiring them and now many employers are going directly to social networking sites to perform searches as well. When you add up all your social networking sites it paints a permanent picture. What does your picture say about you?

I joined LinkedIn a few months ago at the invitation of a colleague. My first thought was, “Can I really manage another social networking site?” But I have been pleasantly surprised by LinkedIn. It seems to be geared to those looking for a job or making business contacts.

I’ve connected with a few librarians who I have never met (not in person anyway) like A-list blogging librarian Sarah Houghton-Jan. I’ve even been contacted by a few friends of friends who are applying for jobs at PLCMC.

Once you set up your profile and make some connections, it’s interesting to see how close we are all connected. Remember the six degrees of separation? LinkedIn works a little like that.

For instance Sarah is listed as a 1st level connection for me. I can browse her connections and see that she is connected to Stephen Abram. So now Abram is listed as a 2nd level connection for me through Sarah.

My favorite part of LinkedIn is the Q&A. You can throw a question out there about anything and get some really good responses from people all around the world in all different professions. Answers are ranked by the person who asked the question. Each question has a “best answer” selected.

I have selected the areas that interest me and subscribed to them via RSS feeds. I mostly just read the responses to questions that interest me, but occasionally a questions gets put out there that I can’t resist answering. It must be my inner-librarian! I made it a mini-goal for 2008 to have at least one answer selected as a best answer.

I was surprised to log in yesterday and see that I scored two best answers this week! One in the area of Occupational Training and one in the area of Professional Networking…and the year is only 1/12th of the way over!

So my question to you is, do you use LinkedIn and how do you use it?

I’ll admit it. I’m a total New Years Resolutions junkie. As far back as I can remember I’ve spent every New Year’s Eve journaling about the past year and setting goals for the new year. There’s something about the feeling of a clean slate that I like. I know that it’s just an arbitrary day on the calendar, but since we celebrate it I figure I may as well take full advantage of it.

Facebook has a cool app that lets you share your goals so your friends can give you some encouragement.

Yet another reason to love Facebook!

p.s. I’m already registered for that Spanish class!

Last year I developed a low-tech way to demonstrate commenting and tagging during a follow-up class on Learning 2.0. We found some funny pictures, taped them to a few flip charts, and gave everyone in the class some post it notes to write down their comments and labels for the pictures. On one of the flip charts we left the post it notes up for everyone to see (Web 2.0). On another flip chart we removed the post it notes as soon as they were posted (Web 1.0).It was fun and useful in a few ways. It was an easy way to get the concept across to the learners. It also gave everyone a chance to get up and move around–which is always good in after lunch training session.Today I came across this clip on YouTube that explains tagging. This is so well-done using just some scraps of paper that have been cut out! The first thing I thought was, “Why didn’t I think of that!” They’ve actually done a lot of clips like this, so it is worth checking out and seems like it would be a good way to introduce folks to some of the more intimidating 2.0 stuff.

Several months ago I set up a del.icio.us account. My original intent was to find a place to store my bookmarks so that I could access them from work and at home.

del.icio.us failed to impress me. As Ed points out, if all you want to do is organize your bookmarks and access them on different computers there are much better products out there that will accomplish this for you.

del.icio.us does not give you a nice organized, alphabetical list of your links. Instead del.icio.us is a social tagging site. I tag sites that are interesting to me, you tag sites that are interesting to you, we network, and in the end we have what is basically a list of the best of the Internet (according to del.icio.us users). For instance, if I go to http://del.icio.us/popular/library2.0 I can see what other delicious users are tagging as library 2.0.

It wasn’t until I met Stephanie Zimmerman, Training Coordinator for the Library System of Lancaster County, that I understood what social bookmarking is all about. Stephanie and I met in a Webinar. We discovered that we have a lot in common. We are both trainers for libraries. We are both moms (or soon to be moms). We connected after class through e-mail and shared links to our social sites: del.icio.us, Flickr, Bloglines.

I had been using all of these sites, but had never gotten the appeal of the social aspect of it.When Stephanie and I began sharing our tagged Web sites, photos, and blogrolls, I finally had my ah-ha moment about social networking. Here is someone with the same interests as me, that I have never met or spoken too, yet we have so much in common. Instead of e-mailing each other links to the great new library training sites that we find, we tag them in del.icio.us instead. Now when I go into del.icio.us, I can see everything that Stephanie has tagged and she can see everything that I have tagged. We are now networked. In addition to seeing all of the sites that Stephanie has tagged, I can also see Stephanie’s network and see what those people have tagged. If I find someone else who has tagged some sites that I like, I can add that person to my network.

This all goes back the wisdom of crowds theory mentioned at the Technology Summit earlier this year, or what I like to call our collective knowledge–a shared ocean of knowledge is more powerful than lots of individual pools of knowledge.

One of the nice features of del.icio.us is the ability to not only share links with the world but to tag them for specific people. For instance, if I find a really great site and I want to make sure Stephanie sees the site, I can tag this site for her. Below is an example of how to tag a site. Once you click the tag button, this screen pops up. The URL is automatically inserted along with the description. You type in your tags or click on recommended or popular tags from below. You can see there are also tags for each person in your network. I tagged this site for Stephanie. The next time she logs in to del.icio.us, she will have this link waiting in her inbox.

When Stephanie and I first started this social networking thing online we made a joke that it felt like we were “cyberstalking” each other. After all, we were sharing all of our tagged Web sites, photos, blog subscriptions, etc. this can feel kind of strange especially if you are a private person. But soon I discovered the benefits of social networking online. In addition to Stephanie, I have found a whole “network” of cyber-friends who find lots of interesting sites out on the Web. There is an old saying that two heads are better than one. With more and more people using social software the possibilities are endless.

Technorati Tags: Del.icio.us, learning 2.0, learning2.0, PLCMCL2, social-software

It is funny how different things appeal to different people. Some people loved Rollyo. I found it was ok, but I usually can find what I want using Google or the advanced Google search. It’s not that often that I only want to search a limited number of Web sites.

For me the best thing so far has been RSS feeds and Bloglines, but then there are other people who did not like Bloglines.

That’s the best part of this 23 things discovery exercise. We don’t have to love or even like any of the things. The point is to experiment, try them out, and find some that are useful. Whether you like the things are not, you are still learning!

Technorati Tags: learning 2.0, learning2.0, PLCMCL2, social-software