#7 Blog About Technology

In the past few weeks, a couple of technology-related articles caught my attention. Both were published in the St Paul Pioneer Press (and yes, I am one of those Luddites who pays to have the newspaper delivered to my doorstep instead of reading it online.)

The first article appeared in the Sunday Nov 17th Pioneer Press on page E5 and it is entitled "If Your Blog Dies, Will Anyone But You Know?" The article is an interview with Derek Gordon, vice president for marketing for Technorati (the Internet search engine for searching blogs). He said the number of blogs world wide is growing (109.2 million is one number he quoted). But no one is reading those blogs! Here is a quote from the article: "The vast majority of blogs exist in a state of total or near-total obscurity." So, for those of you who are worried about what will happen to your blogs when SPPL Learning 2.0 is over, "STOP WORRYING!" You can't get any more obsure than you probably are now.

The second article appeared in the November 16, 2007 Pioneer Press and it talks about how Concordia University in St Paul is switching from Microsoft Outlook-based software to Google Apps. (GOING ALL-OUT FOR GOOGLE ST. PAUL'S CONCORDIA U. IS AMONG SWITCHERS TO THE SEARCH GIANT'S ONLINE SOFTWARE SUITE.) Apparently, Google Apps online software is less-costly than Microsoft software and offers many of the same options: e-mail (dubbed Gmail), scheduling, instant messaging, online document sharing, and more.

I thought it was interesting that when preparing for this particular exercise in Learning 2.0, I looked at several of the other participants blogs. A couple of blogs said they didn't understand the relevance of all the 2.0 learning activities in their lives or in their work. I, too, am having problems understanding how I will use some of these new found technologies. But, having used several of the online Google software products, I have to say I am looking forward to Week 9 of the program. Hopefully, we will be exploring Goople software in more detail!