Friday, November 28th, 2008
Thing 18. Create a Twitter account and add some friends.
Why? To understand how 24/7 connection changes communication and collaboration online
Please do Things 16 and 17 before this one although they are separate ways of communicating.
Create account
Joining twitter is just the same as joining Facebook, except you don’t have to go to your email and click on a link to verify your membership.
It is important that once you have joined, you go to Settings (top right corner) and select “Protect my updates”. This means that only people you have allowed to “follow” you can see your updates.
Find Folks
Use the “Find Folks” search box in the green sidebar to search for the user “RossO49″ or go straight to his profile page: http://twitter.com/ROSSO49 . Select the grey “follow” button under his photo.
Look at the green sidebar on his profile page and you will see pictures of his friends. Mouse over each image to see the person’s name. Like we did with Facebook, click on some of RossO49’s friends to add them as your friends.
Remember to check your gmail account in case someone has added you as a friend. This will also display on your sidebar as, e.g, “2 new follower requests”.
Thing 19. Tweet at least once a day for five days between Monday 8th - Friday 12th.
Why? To see twitter in action - it’s the only way to “get” it.
Mon 8th - Friday 12th is Twitter week. Twitter only really works when it has critical mass. Please tweet at least once a day and share something work related that you are doing. If you can’t do it that week, you may try it another week.
Enter text in the box under “What are you doing?” and select “update”.
IF YOU WANT MORE
- Add a picture to your profile.
- Work out how to “Direct message” someone.
- Use the ‘Help’ link to find out more stuff, e.g., how @replies work.
- Keep twittering
- Watch this video by librarian David Lee King about software people have written to do crazy things with twitter. i r fluffin yr twitterz: or, Twitter, part 2: the “fluff” (made over a year ago so some things may now be out of date)
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Friday, November 28th, 2008
(many thanks to Kathryn G. whose 2007 blog was shamelessly ripped off to create this one!)
Thing 16: Join Facebook and add a profile
Why? Over 100 million people are there. Find out what it is about.
Thing 17: Add at least 3 friends and join a Facebook Group
Why? To understand how a social network works
GETTING STARTED
There is a good 10 minute overview of the history of Facebook and the basics on Youtube.
Alternatively, Kathryn made a 4 minute screencast for this exercise in last year’s “23 Things”. It is very pacy, so she suggests you first watch it all the way through. Then play it, pause it, do the bit just described, play a bit more, do that bit etc. Note that there have been a number of changes to Facebook since last year so this wont be exactly as you see it today.
The screencast shows you how to do more things than the exercises require. Those that are part of the exercises are marked with a * .
- * Join
- * Create a profile
- * Search for a friend
- * Add a friend
- * Look at a friend’s friends to find friends
- * Accept friendship
- * View a friend’s’ profile
- *Join a Facebook group
- Write on a friend’s wall
- Add a Facebook Application
IF YOU WANT MORE:
Write on a friend’s wall or Add a Facebook Application.
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Friday, November 14th, 2008
Thing 12: Social Book-marking & del.icio.us
What is it?
The “book-marking” part of social book-marking is the online equivalent of the ‘favourites’ list (of websites etc) that you manage from the browser on your own computer. The “social” part of social book-marking is the way you can share with others and search what they have saved. Del.icio.us is one of many social book-marking services.
If you’d like to see what a del.icio.us account looks like you can go to 23katethings
You can watch this introductory video (+ some other much more complicated things to do with del.icio.us)
One attraction to using del.icio.us, rather than ‘favourites’, is that your delicious account can be accessed from any computer, but more interestingly …
- you can add your own ‘tags’ – categories or terms (aka keywords) that mean something to you; one website can have any number of tags
- you can then organise your tags into ‘tag bundles’ – giving you groups of sites that have something(s) in common – depending on its tags a site can appear in more than one bundle
- you can keep your bookmarks private – although you will be able to see all of them, those that have a padlock symbol cannot be seen by anyone else
- you can create a network with other people who may have similar, or disparate, interests (membership of a network can be kept private)
and lots more
WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO BEFORE YOU CAN TICK OFF THING 12:
1st register for an account at http://delicious.com – click on ‘join now’ and follow the 3 steps
- at Step 1 you will select your username and fill in the form
- at Step 2 you will be asked if you want to ‘add firefox extension’ – I recommend that you accept this – it only involves a very quick automatic closedown and restart of firefox – then you have the del.icio.us book-marking tools available on your toolbar; or you can add the button to your toolbar later on by clicking and dragging the delicious icon from the address bar of your own account
- at Step 3 you can import any existing bookmarks from, for instance, your ‘favourites’
*if you want to do this step at one of the workshop sessions you will need to remote desktop - please ask Aaron if you don’t know how to do this already*
Only you will be able to see your imported bookmarks when they are first transferred to del.icio.us. You can edit each entry - deciding how you want to tag it, and which, if any, you want to keep private. Although you will be able to see all of your bookmarks, those that have a padlock symbol cannot be seen by anyone else, even members of your network.
2nd add 3 or 4 websites to your account
There are several ways to do this:
- right click in the page and select ‘bookmark this page in delicious’ – this doesn’t work from every page, but does in the blog All the Modern Things
or
- use the del.icio.us button on your toolbar (either the one that appeared if you selected the firefox extension when you were registering, or one you installed yourself)
or
- in a newspaper article, for instance, scroll down to ‘share this item’ options e.g. at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24611771-12377,00.html – and click on the del.icio.us symbol
or
- copy the url of the page you want to save, go to your del.icio.us account and select ‘save a new bookmark’, and paste in the url
Don’t forget to tag your selections.
Consider creating some tag bundles and a tag cloud – select ‘tag options’ from the pale blue menu to the right hand side of the page – embed the cloud in your thing12 blog post.
3rd add 23katethings to your network
- go to the ‘people’ drop down menu on your del.icio.us home page
- select ‘add a user to Network’ in the pale blue menu
- type in the username < 23katethings > and click on ‘Add’
4th blog it!
Posted in 12 - delicious.com | No Comments »
