Sharing is Caring

Ok, I tried to get you on Google Reader, but you weren't interested. Only one person took me up on it (thanks, Sach).

What is it that you people don't understand? Isn't it clear that the internet is powerful? Isn't it clear that there is too much information for each of us to deal with on our own? Isn't this why people send around articles to their friends?

A common 'meme' (to use the parlance of our times) is that "news that is interesting will find me." I agree with that. However, it helps to have a living, breathing social network to help disseminate that news faster. It also helps to harness the power of the internet. We're living in an age of unprecedented innovation, with very useful free services being created every day. If we don't take a look around, we might be left behind.

I keep up with the world around me by using Google Reader and sharing posts (if you were my 'friend', you would have gotten an invite code to a new service today). I also use del.icio.us. Previously, I recommended instapaper, and I still do for news articles and the like. In that same post, I even said that I never really got into delicious. Well, that's changed. I'm now using it to keep my bookmarks organized.

I LOVE tagging as a mechanism for organization. You just give a couple of one word descriptors for each bookmark and you can always find your bookmarks in a given category. Go check out my bookmarks. You'll immediately notice that I've bookmarked a bunch of websites about apartment and others with cool productivity tools.

The next benefit of delicious is that its a web service. As you may recall, I'm enamored with web services. I love having access to my email, feeds, bookmarks , etc from any computer with an internet connection (which is by the way almost all computers and many cell phones). In this case, I find that its useful to have access to my links from work, home and sometimes a friend's computer.

Now, if only some of my friends would get on these web services with me, I'd have access to a much richer world of information and entertainment. Imagine if you had never heard of youtube or facebook or hulu. I'm just here giving you some of the tools that make the social web more interesting. Take a look at the 'Follow me to..." box on the right side of this page to see some of the services that I'm using/trying out. There's obviously a lot more out there than this, but I think it's a pretty good start. Let me know what you think in the comments.