Gwen Bell organizes this “Best of” challenge so she writes the prompts. Answering them is not quite like being a student because I can ignore them if I want to. My seventh-grade students had to write several times a year on writing prompts the district distributed, and I sympathized totally when one would say, “I just can’t think of anything to write about!”
Now I find that I have to give an indirect answer to this question (what was my best web tool) to answer it at all. I’ve been fairly gung-ho on internet stuff – Facebook, Twitter, etc. I don’t feel I can fairly judge social-networking tools (not that anyone is asking me to), nor can I understand their impact on the rest of the world, if I can’t use them myself. So it’s been full steam ahead. I even caught the Google Wave! But since no one I’m involved with is surfing the wave yet, and since I’m retired, it just sits there on my screen ebbing and flowing, mostly ebbing. (I have some invitations if anyone wants one.). So that takes care of social networking/work productivity.
I have a web site and a blog, which means I have to understand Google analytics, AdSense, and the associated terminology – what a unique visitor is and so on. I talked about my blog a few days ago – on my blog! What I didn’t mention then is that the statistics drive you to get more unique visitors! Grow the blog! Compete with yourself! And silly me, I thought someone might want to buy a photo from my web page. Ever the optimist – photos are a dime a dozen.
I’ve been writing on eHow (I’ve made $12 so it’s not a get-rich-quick endeavour) and eZines. I have an etsy store, SusanReepPhotoArt (again, thinking someone might want to buy one of the still lives or something) and a Flicker account. So I’m with it technologically. Oh, and I have an iPod! But I forget to listen to it. And a BlackBerry which I love.
Although, you know what? Now that my email comes over the BlackBerry, there’s no anticipation to get home and wonder what email I might have. Just like email replaced the anticipation we felt when we went to the mailbox. Anyway, I get it all instantly and I’m so used to having my BlackBerry in my pocket, that sometimes I think my pocket is vibrating when it’s empty.
Texting might just be my best web tool. Better than phoning because you don’t have to worry about hearing the person (For some reason, I can’t hear well over my BlackBerry. I don’t think I position it correctly.) Texting is less intrusive, also. And it can be secret! Sort of. As much as anything can be secret. Not much.
So here I stand. Or text. Or tweet. Or facebook. Or or or. I get the idea. Technology is going to develop at lightning speed so I’ll still have to keep up. I’m 63 and plan on 40 more years, so I can’t let it eclipse me. (If my parents had not been so computer-phobic, the internet would be enriching their lives now at 91 and 86.)
I’ve gotta feeling, though, that folks in general are tiring of so much instant communication. Facebook use, or frequency of use, seems to be falling. I think we’re all realizing how much time it all eats up from our creative lives. I checked out a link from whollyjeanne on twitter and bingo! It was the push I needed to rethink my strategies. Check it out yourself. Although I must warn you, the item about hair dye is seriously misguided. I intend to keep dying my hair for a long, long time.
