Feeds Week 4

This was a fairly straightforward excercise. A great time-saving concept and easy to do. I guess sooner or later it makes sense to choose one platform and aggregate all your web stuff at one site rather having this blog here and the RSS feeds at Bloglines. Being able to have public and private feeds is good. Added feeds to BBC news, Christchurch City Libraries blog, All Blacks news, PC Magazine etc and have added the easy subscribe bookmarklet to favourites. See http://www.bloglines.com/public/Joblogs

Week 3 Flickr mashups

Had a look at Travel planner where you can check out the itineraries of other people, customise your own trip after copying theirs or start from scratch. You can then add your photos to the schedule for your own record and other people to see.
I searched for any schedules taking in Kabul (Afghanistan) to see how it handled non-mainstream destinations and because I've always wanted to go there. Surprisingly several people recommended it : lovely weather, friendly people but I think they may have all been Muslim men. Several hotels were listed but it was a bit short on things to do - a keep your head down sort of place.
Good application to help you make travel decisions

Week 3 :Flickr and Afghans rule

Loved this photo and think Flickr is fab - rich content and mashup potential really interesting and creative.

As an aside, Afghan hounds have a very bad press. I had one for 14 years. They're reputed to be 'the blondes' of the dog species but I found mine to be clever in the way a cat is : do as you're told if it's in your best interests (eat, walk) but not if it's silly (fetch).

Had a look at all these sites. Bebo didn't appeal -wrong demographic. Conspiracist in me wonders about all the information gathering associated with these social development sites. Created a minimalist profile on Facebook for the sake of the exercise and added a link on the blog but can't imagine using it big time. Probably easy way to track what your kids are up to!

So far so good. This is a good idea but feel it could well take up more time than 15 minutes per day. Interesting that people who have grown up with this technology seem to have few qualms about revealing themselves compared with older people who may have tended to guard their privacy.
One misgiving I have is that there is already enough "chatter" in our lives - can we say that texting, blogging, social networking etc is really improving the connectedness between people?