Friday, November 9, 2007

23,000 Things

Didja miss me? I've been off doing useful things for the past two months instead of keeping up with 23 Things. It's not that I didn't want to do this; it's that four hours a day at a job filled with twice that amount of work doesn't allow, on most days, a chance to get a cup of tea, much less learn new and exciting stuff about Web 2.0. And doing this at home is not an option. As we're at the end of the alloted time frame for doing this John encouraged me to use today to try to finish...and so here I am.

Since it's been so long since I came in here I totally forgot my password to get in to edit or add to my blog. So there was the waiting for password help from Google...sheesh. Anyway, I'm zipping through 23 Things and taking notes.

Fun stuff!! RSS seems like the most useful to me, although social bookmarking takes a close second. I periodically check news of all sorts on many different web sites and now I can have it all on a handy-dandy RSS page! Woohoo!! Social bookmarking via del.icio.us will clean up all my bookmarks and make it easier for me to not only find all the great sites I need and use, but will allow me to share a lot of information with a lot of my mystery/Sherlock Holmes buddies.

And speaking of Sherlock Holmes...when I was doing the 23 Things about wikis I had to feel a bit smug. It's something I've already been using for the past several months. A friend asked me to join with him and several others on a Sherlock Holmes wiki called "Sherlockia," which happens to be a screen name of mine for e-mail and instant messaging, etc. In fact, my friend asked if he could use that name as it most suited his idea for the wiki.

The Sherlockia wiki is for Sherlock Holmes fans to post interesting or humorous pieces, either of a scholarly nature or just for information. What most non-Sherlockians don't realize is that Sherlock Holmes stories, for those of us obsessed, are our "Canon." Most of our interest lies in the character of Sherlock Holmes, the "thinking machine," but many of us are also interested in Victorian life, the state of the world at that time, the roles of men and women in society...well, here I am going on about it. For those who like a more humorous approach, there are other interesting characters in the stories and endless "errors" in the writings, such as a train schedule given that really didn't exist in Real Life. In our "playing the game," as it's called, we like to dig into and work out these little discrepancies and worry them like a dog with an old bone. It's silly and all, but it keeps a lot of geeks off the streets :)

Although I'm enjoying this blogging stuff here, I don't really care for it overall. To me it's like a huge diary that all the world can read, and I simply don't have that much to say. Nor am I interested in someone else's opinion all that much, so reading and/or subscribing to blogs holds little interest for me. Since I'm involved in listgroups, chats and message boards I get enough of other people's opinions on a daily basis.

I did enjoy watching the little videos from Commoncraft. I could relate to the visuals on those better than pages of text to read. I plan to recommend Commoncraft to many of the people on my Mystery Babes listgroup as I change our e-mail group to something else, perhaps a wiki. Many of the women on the group are less than cyber-savvy and many of them don't realize the options out there to learn all this fascinating information. I hope to walk them gently through the scary forest of Web 2.0, with a flashlight to show them that those monsters behind the trees are really just shadows...and that they can be a part of technology even if all they've known up to now is how to send an e-mail.

Isn't all of this just mind-bogglingly wonderful?! I can't imagine what more wonderful things will be a part of our lives five years from now.

No comments: