Punctuating The Silence

Looking through my blog’s archive, I never did blog about my getting started with Facebook, but I’m blaming, er, crediting the 2008 O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). They had put up a note that Facebook was to be the social network of choice for that year. Previously, I had been avoiding Facebook, but with that final nudge, I relented and created the account. And Facebook has been great for reconnecting with people, and glimpsing little bits of peoples’ lives you wouldn’t necessarily see.

There’s a new social networking concept that I’ve dabbled with, but never really got into, called “microblogging”. This is where you make short posts, usually only a sentence or two, or a link. The site that’s been around the longest and is the most successful is Twitter, and no, I do not have an account there. Yet.

I just finished reading an interesting entry on the TED Blog called “How To Talk While People are Twittering“, and it discusses an article on how, as a speaker, being aware of the backchannel communication of your audience can benefit both the audience and you. The point for me is that I’ve been going to OSCON for several years now, and it was only a few years ago that I discovered the traditional OSCON backchannel: IRC.  From that, many of the points this article enumerates, I know first-hand to be true.
So, going to the 2009 OSCON site, seeing that the very first icon in the list of social networks and media to be used this year is Twitter, I have very little doubt that in addition to IRC, Twitter is going to be heavily used and will be another great source of commentary and information (we *are* talking about a group of notorious early adopters).

I know I can easily follow the twittering without an account: there are lots of aggregators out there, but I’m guessing that I’ll create an account for 2 reasons: the first is to be able to participate in the discussion, and the second is that I’ve been saying for the last few years that I’ll blog the conference, and while last year I did ok, I don’t have the greatest track record. Twitter might not be great, in-depth prose, but it will be (micro) blogging, and it will provide a trail that will serve as a memory aid should I then go back and write real blog posts.

Look for me on Twitter. Coming Soon. Summer of ‘09. Maybe before.

I’ve been slow to jump on the social networking bandwagon, but one that I’ve been enjoying great success with is LinkedIn. I’ve been able to reconnect with people I haven’t had contact with for years. One person in particular I’ve been trying to find for several years. They’re the sort to keep a low profile – unlisted phone number, nothing returned when Googling them, etc – so when I did my periodic search on LinkedIn, I was excited to see their name pop up. The only problem, though, is that while we’ve been friends since high school, we share no post-secondary educational institutions, and we’ve never worked together. Of the remaining catagories in LinkedIn’s “Invite this person to your network”, they require an email address. I understand why they do this (I don’t like spam as much as the next person), but now I seem to be stuck.

Almost, anyway. I have a free LinkedIn account, so to send messages within their system, I either need to upgrade to a paid account (the cheapest is $20.00 per month), or order an “InMail” a la carte, at $10 per message. So yesterday I paid my $10, and sent my message. Totally worth it, and will be even more so when he responds!

Update: I just got email from him, so I’m calling this unqualified success!  Money well spent.

I’m writing this post (after another lengthy hiatus, I realize) from a new service that a colleague told me about. Called IMified, this service allows access to a number of services and tools conveniently through your IM client. This first post will serve as a test to see how well it works, but this seems very useful, especially for quick posts. In addition to the blogging module, I also have access to my Backpack account , as well as other note, reminder and network tools. They also have widgets for calendars, other blogging tools, and various social networks. Looks very cool, and I’m interested to see how useful this becomes to me!

More is coming – there’s been a lot going on lately, in our lives, and, of course, the geeky stuff too.

Or, A Geek Discovers that it Can Be Fun to Communicate After All

Well, as usual, it’s been a while since my last blog post. Hopefully you’ve been checking out the tumblelog (hint: it’s got an rss feed too!). But it’s no substitute for actually writing…

If you had told me a year or two ago that I would be as immersed in Internet communication as I seem to find my self now, I would have laughed and just shook my head. Email excepted (oh, and a bit of unix-based talk/ytalk in the early 90s), I didn’t see much point.

Then came a colleague at work setting up a Jabber server in order to have a chat room for the group here, and I was dragged kicking and screaming (ok, not much of that, but I might have stubbed a toe) into IM. It wasn’t long after that, and Google introduced GTalk, and integrating that into GMail meant that now a few other people I knew (most notably family) were able to easily chat.

The next nail in the coffin was my annual attendance of the O’Reilly Open Source Conference. Thanks to a colleague (there are those colleagues again!) who went with me, I became aware of the back-channel conference: in IRC. Admittedly, this was not only an amusing aside (some brilliant comments and observations are posted here, not to mention the sharp wit), but an interesting insight into some bits of info that wouldn’t normally be available (the conference chairs were active participants on the relevant channels). This year when I went, in addition to the new-found public server, I set up a simple IRC server on my home network for the benefit of myself and two friends: a private chat room where we could chat.

That slippery slope had me careening into the sett-up of a full-blown server, complete with bot (and I’m even writing TCL code, a language I never did learn, to extend it!), for a group of mostly-sysadmins that I’m in, which meets every Friday for breakfast.

The clincher happened in the last week. One of my sisters transferred to the University of Calgary, and in her “I’ve arrived” email, she listed her Skype address. That was the second time in as many weeks that I’d been given a Skype address. I’d looked in to Skype when it was announced, of course, but wasn’t interested (we already have VoIP for our main phone, which gives us cheap calling). So I signed up for a Skype account, and in the short week that I’ve had it, I’ve had an audio and a video call (my sister in Calgary has a Mac, too!), and 3 chat sessions. I’m in.

Add to that my Grand Central account, and I’m pretty communicative, which I have to say, as someone who has always hated the phone, feels pretty weird. But it’s also cool, this new-fangled internet thingy that let’s me chat with and talk (and see) people all over the world.

So all of you who haven’t talked to me in a bit, there’s really no excuse now – I’m connected.

(I’ve even added a couple of icons on the sidebar to get you started!)