Spare Time

Friends have asked what I do in my spare time. Well, I seem to spend a lot of it reading blogs! I look at blogs to do with volunteering and education, including technology in education. That last one takes a disproportionate amount of my interest. There is a revolution happening on the Internet, and education/research seems to be the driver for it. It's on all fronts. It's not simply about 'traditional' web-based reference resources and applications, it's also the instant technologies termed "Real-Time Web", though in computing terms there's nothing "Real Time" about it. It's "Web 2.0", though that term doesn't convey any information either.

So, to give an idea of what I'm talking about, here are a few of them:

Blogger, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, FriendFeed, Instapaper, MySpace, Orkut, Ping.fm, Posterous, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Twitter, Wiki, Edmodo, Diigo, Animoto, Zoho suite, Glogster, LiveBinders, Vocaroo, Typewith.Me, Schoology, Wall Wisher, Creator.zoho, Xtranormal, Skype, Voicethread, drop.io, Google Friend Connect, Scibblar, Polleverywhere, Survey Monkey, sliderocket, screentoaster, Blogtalk, skitch, Wordle, Moodle, Bighuge Labs, hypercam, Scribble Maps, Google Web Apps, Microsoft Web Apps, Screenr, Wordpress, Tagxedo, Voicethread, Storybird, PICNIK, Screencastle, BetterLesson, Google Earth, LinoIt, Grooveshark, GoAnimate, Evernote, Fotobabble, Meebo, NirvanaHQ, Jing, Google sites, Edublogs, xtranormal, Prezi, yodio, Primary Pad, Zotero, twite, iPadio, TinyChat, Desire2Learn, Doodle, Flixtime, Shidonni, Aviary, ZackAttack, Board800, Weebly Education, Audioboo, Drop Box, Glogster, igoogle, Mixbook, Wallwisher, Voicethread, Youtube, all things Google, Vimeo, Embed It In, Mind Meister, Ning, Prezi, Alice, Blabberize.

And believe me, that is far from an exhaustive list.

I might stand a chance of keeping up if only I could get off the starting blocks!

So today I subscribe to 138 blogs just to stay in the race. Those I look at frequently are loosely grouped as:
7 General
11 Edu-English
24 volunteering
29 Edu-tech

plus 67 Edu-tech blogs which I look at less frequently.

And the Edu-tech guys are posting stuff between once a week and five times a day.