My Clips- Cause of plane crash west of Bozeman under investigation, pilot pronounced dead at scene August 31, 2010
- The man who wanted train horns August 16, 2010
- Money well spent? August 15, 2010
- Local telecom company gets $64 million to bring high-speed Internet to rural Gallatin County August 5, 2010
- Montana Opticom receives $64 million in stimulus money for rural broadband August 4, 2010
- AT&T to replace Alltel in Montana within a year June 25, 2010
- Bozeman twin looks to scale namesake peak: K2 June 21, 2010
- High water claims Amsterdam Road bridge June 12, 2010
- Trio of veteran Belgrade teachers retiring June 7, 2010
- MSU robot digger wins NASA competition May 29, 2010
Michael Becker writes about journalism, new media and digital culture in general.
About the author
Michael Becker has been blogging about academia, digital culture and journalism since 2005. He is the Web editor of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.
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Social networking resolutions
For the past year and a half, I have been distracted to the point of exhaustion by trying out every new information management and social networking mashup that's found its way into my Firefox plugin folder. These have included Zotero, Google Notebook, Del.icio.us, Diigo, StumbleUpon, Google Docs, Scribefire, and seemingly dozens of other browser plugin cloudware apps.
I'm so over it. I want stability. I want consistency and usefulness without having to open up NeoOffice or Microsoft Word whenever I want to take notes. And no, I'm not satisfied with Scrivener or any of the other note conglomeration packages -- I don't trust them because they organize stuff for me, and, at a deeper level of incongruity, I just don't think like the people who can make use of those programs.
So, here's a declaration. I'm going to narrow down the number of plugins I'm using. Zotero? Gone, I think; otherwise why the hell did I spent over $100 on End Note (granted, I didn't know Zotero existed before the purchase). Google Notebook? Useless for me. Gone. StumbleUpon? A fun diversion, but ultimately useless for me. Gone.
The keepers: Del.icio.us and all its assorted plugins. I just like the site, and I've already put so much into it already; Scribefire, handy because it lets me blog quickly, like it did with this post.
Now, Diigo is an interesting question. It's got some features that I like, such as the ability to highlight Web pages for later reference. However, I don't want to just mirror my Del.icio.us bookmarks, and I want to post to as few sites as possible when I decide to bookmark an article. And while I see the value of the highlighting, I realize that anything useful to me gets written down and saved either as a .doc file or as a blog post. Rarely do I return to the Web site to go over my own notes again -- I just don't trust the Web site to be there when I get back.
I'll have to consider Diigo more deeply, but I'm thinking it's gone.
In a related bit of information, I have to praise Facebook for allowing me to automatically import my Picasa photos and my Del.icio.us bookmarks into my profile there. It kind of makes the "share on Facebook" shortcut pointless, thus streamlining my Web day. Hooray!
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