This image has nothing to do with the text in this post… but any excuse to post a daily photo is welcome 🙂 I just like the bright pretty colors. This was a flower in one of the gardens outside the Jordan River Temple that I noticed this past Saturday.So I’ve finally been tinkering with my blog as of late, adding this and that. I’m just a step away from getting the banner replaced so that it’s really personalized (yeah. Just have to create that banner…)
You’ll notice the addition of some dynamic content in the two columns
on the right– one is a Twitter feed, and the other a little widget
from last.fm– a couple of social networking sites / utilities (not to mention I’ve actually linked other blogs from mine– I’m no longer a complete dead end, woohoo!). Social
networking is all the rage these days, and thankfully it has matured
and advanced technologically well past the old myspace. Many other
social networking utilities and sites exist, but these are a few that I
use for now. If you already know all about these utilities– you can just skip reading this post 😉 It’s my lame attempt to try to get more people sucked in to the madness that is social networking, hehe.
Twitter provides some functionality I’ve long wanted. It acts as a sort
of mini blog– so now I can post little inane things that just aren’t
worthy of a full on blog post. And aside from being able to embed your
Twitter feed on a blog or other social networking site, the service
itself allows you to network with other Twitter users– you can both
follow the updates of others and allow other people to follow yours.
It’s kinda like status updates on facebook, only that’s ALL it tracks,
so they’re all in one place, you can kinda see what people are up to.
Whether you share something you’re doing, a funny quote someone just
said, or say something to another twitter user– good stuff. It’s also
great that I can submit “tweets” via text message.
Last.fm— I’ve seen this widget on some other blogs, and only today
realized that it was set up not to show what they were listening to on
Last.FM’s site, but what they were listening to on their iPods and
iTunes libraries. Very cool– music is one of those things I love, and
it’s fun to both see what others are listening to as well as share what
you’re listening to from moment to moment.
Last.FM seems to do that
well, it provides a way to social network with other music listeners…
you can see who else is listening to the artists you are, how many
people listen to it, etc etc. It’s also cool just to be able to look at
your friends’ listening habits and tastes. (Note that it also works
with Winamp and Windows Media Player, it’s not limited to iPod/iTunes).
There’s more to Last.FM, but this is what I like so far about it. Check
it out.
I suppose the next step for me may be flickr. I have an account but have never used it. I’ve seen that on peoples
blogs now for quite some time– you just post photos (with descriptions
if you like, perhaps), and have a feed to your flickr photo stream with
thumbnails of recent photos somewhere on your site / blog. It’s just
another way for people to share what they’re up to. Whether it’s photos
intended as art or just photos illustrating every day life, people can
follow your photo stream and comment on your photos. Rather than being
a private photo album, it’s the social networking version of a photo
album.
It may well be more convenient than creating a blog post for each photo that I decide I want to upload, while allowing me to be part of a community rather than just keeping to myself over here at sloanie.com.