Thoughts on teaching, technology, learning and life in an era of change.
 
Forgive me father for I have sinned ~ Web 2.0 guilt
June 30th, 2008

Well, in the last two days I have signed up to not one, not two but three new “Web 2.0 tools”. I was intrigued by Posterous and it’s incredible ease of use. One can perform many tasks simply via email ~ a tool that many are quite adept at using already. Why not use Posterous to set up a blog? I signed up. Three bloggers have highlighted Posterous during the last 24 hours, namely Larry Ferlazzo, Michelle Martin and Silvia Tolisano. It is certainly an interesting tool and I shall be sharing it with my colleagues this Thursday.

Earlier this evening I received an email invite from Clay Burell to join Plurk and I did. It looks neat. I will give it a go. I had read about it on Read~Write Web some time back and it has popped up in a few posts and tweets as a possible alternative to the long suffering Twitter.

Then, since I was seemingly in a drunken web 2.0 haze I signed up for Diigo despite my digs here, here and here (scroll down) I will have to thoroughly explore Diigo in order to derive the greatest benefit from this tool. Well, it has been 3 months since the big Diigo whirlwind of last March so I here I am all signed up and I even joined a few groups.

But, I signed up for Posterous within 24 hours of its discovery and for Plurk the second I read Clay’s invite. I did not allow time to frame my decision. I jumped straight in. Web 2.0 overdose. Bless me father for I have sinned.

How did I create this post? My wife took my photograph using a small Casio digital camera. I uploaded the image to my Mac using a USB 2.0 card reader. I imported the image into Comic Life and added the word balloons, etc. I exported the Comic as a jpeg image and then resized it in Adobe Photoshop Elements and exported it using the Save For Web option which allows you to fine tune file size and quality. I used CyberDuck to upload the image plus the various logos that I had screen captured via SharpShooter,

5 Responses to “Forgive me father for I have sinned ~ Web 2.0 guilt”

  1. Michele Martin Says:

    You are absolved of your sins, John. :-) Great photo and I love that you described exactly how you did this. I think we need more people talking about how they pull together the work that they do using Web 2.0 tools to help others see how to do this sort of thing. Now I’m off to post this to Posterous. :-)

  2. John Larkin Says:

    Thank you for the prompt comment Michelle. Much appreciated. And thank you for absolving my sins… how many prayers should I say as penance. I shall endeavour to add my little ‘how to do this addendum’ after each post. We probably take some of our skills and techniques for granted and by writing the steps down it makes me think about them and others wiil certainly suggest easier ways to get the same thing done.

    Best wishes, John.

  3. Sue Waters Says:

    mmmm :) not sure what to say. I work hard on letting the forward scouts do all the work before I give it all a try. Diigo I have an account but aren’t using because to be honest I’m suffering a bit of information overload. Don’t have time for extra links of being part of a group and del.icio.us works well for how I want to use it.

    With Plurk the jury is still out. Will wait and think about it. :) Let me know how you go :)

  4. Clay Burell Says:

    Go and sin some more.

    Signed,

    Your heretical friend 2.0.

  5. John Larkin Says:

    Sue: I agree with you on the forward scouts idea. That is my usual mode. Yet I thought it was time to explore Diigo as I had seen some positive revelations over the last few months. Posterous is a tool I will not use but as Michelle Martin indicated on her blog it would be a great way to ease others into the concept of blogging using a tool they understand… email. It is ridiculously easy to use. I know one can blog via email anyway but setting up Posterous is simply easy. Plurk looked weird and is weird and I may not use it but, being a history teacher, the timeline is an interface I can handle.

    Clay: If you insist. See you at the Inquisition.