Michele meant it in the nicest way…but I have been thinking about her comment this weekend that I am a delicious “bookmarking fiend!” Some might suggest that I am a bit compulsive or obsessive about using delicious, but perhaps a little reflection on that use will be illustrative.
I looked at my delicious bookmarks this morning and found that in the past two days, I have bookmarked 34 URLs. A quick breakdown shows my interests over those two days:
- Web 2.0 Tools ——> 14 sites
- Blogs and Blogging —> 5 sites
- eLearning ———–> 5 sites
- Web 2.0 ————-> 3 sites
- about delicious ——-> 3 sites
- tech adoption ——–> 2 sites
- personal ————-> 2 sites
So even though it was the weekend, my mind was obviously on work!
As to how I found those sites above, I have two related processes that work for me. First, I have a well-developed network in delicious with colleagues whose opinion I trust. Currently, that network consists of 9 graduate students and 32 colleagues from higher education. As they tag items worldwide in their delicious accounts, it shows up in my network. I then feed that stream into my Google Reader. Two in England and Romania make my tagging appear sluggish! They are the true fiends, and I reap the rewards of watching their tagging activity.
In my Google Reader, I track 32 blogs, 11 news feeds, and 2 Ning feeds, as well as my delicious network stream. I have made it a habit to check Google Reader first thing each morning before I begin work and twice more during the day.
{Of course, I also track I CAN HAS CHEEZ BURGER! - but that is just to keep me smiling!}
Google Reader is therefore my connection to the wired world, and through it, I find the sites that interest me…and that I then tag. It has become my primary personal learning environment - customized to the interests that I hold. Between the RSS feeds from sites like SlashDot or TechCrunch to bloggers like Wes Fryer, Alan Levine, and Guy Kawasaki; and my network feed, I am continually shown relevant sites that impact my job and my life. Tagging is just a way to keep track of them for later use…and it is a habit I do not intend to lose any time soon!
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