ifttt: If this, then that

I came across an article about "ifttt: If This Then That". This is a web-based service that you an use with your various online identities, services, and places for storing and recording info. In the channels feature it describes numerous items, such as Evernote, Zootool, foursquare, and many more. Several of them I was not acquainted with, so this helped me.

10 ways to re-use your old gadgets

Sometimes technology moves so fast that we don't know what we can do with our old gadgets!
(You may need to get some help though!)


Here's a link to some interesting ways to find another use for your older items.
http://lifehacker.com/5901650/top-10-awesome-things-you-can-do-with-the-underused-gadgets-you-already-own?tag=lifehacker-top-10

Facebook's Biggest Privacy Threat May Be You

According to an article posted in the Techlicious Blog, Facebook's Biggest Privacy Threat May Be You. 
There are also several ideas in the blog to help you with setting and protecting your privacy.

Diigo

I always loved the idea of bookmarking sites, where you can store bookmarks to sites you visit in the cloud, but I never wound up using a service consistently. I tried delicious, but never got used to how it organized your sites, and when it looked like they were going to be sold and shut down, I shifted over to Google Bookmarks. I loved their "list" feature because it was similar to using folders instead of having to tag every link like on delicious. But then, Google shut down their list feature--just turned it off! All my beautifully curated lists were thrown into one big pile with one tag. Needless to say I was frustrated and looked again for another alternative. After surfing, reading, and researching, at the beginning of February I started up on Diigo.

Like delicious, Diigo is a web-based social bookmarking site. So far I think it's the best of the 3 sites I've used! Here are some of the reasons I like it:

• The toolbar is easy to use. If I highlight text on a webpage before I click "Bookmark this page," the highlighted text is automatically saved to the "Description" box. Very handy!
• I can mark everything private, or allow others to see what I've saved.
• I can highlight sentences on the website, and Diigo saves them for me! When I go back and visit a bookmarked site, my highlights are still there. (No more wondering why exactly I thought this site was worth bookmarking!)
• I can also post "sticky notes" on a page, too, with my own comments about it. Kind of like writing in the margins of a book!
• You can email your highlighted, sticky-noted site to a friend, and THEY can see your highlights and notes, too.
• When I go back and look at my bookmarks, the sentences I've highlighted show up in the annotated list...which means I can see the pieces I thought were valuable without clicking through to the site itself.
• Diigo runs on tags, just like delicious and Google, but it also supports a list feature. The cool thing is you can turn your lists into handouts of links, and Diigo does all the formatting for you. 
• I haven't used the social features of Diigo yet, but I could follow other people on Diigo, just like on Twitter, and see what they bookmark. Or I could be part of a group that collects bookmarks together.

The other reason Diigo is working better for me than the other services doesn't have anything to do with them! I noticed when using Google that I had a hard time remembering what tags I used to save a site with. I knew something was there, but couldn't figure out how to get at it easily.

So before I saved a single site on Diigo, I wrote down a starter taxonomy for myself. I tried to think of the ways I remembered sites, and then came up with a brief list of tags to use consistently. For instance, I will remember if something was a slide set, or a pdf, or a video. So now I always tag each site with a format tag. I also tend to remember what type of content it was--like was it a research study, or  blog post, or a news article. So I tag everything that way too. Then I also tag something by what project I'm researching at the time. So I might tag a site with "Storytime Newsletter," or "Spark Activity Cards" or the name of a training class I'm working on. And then last but not least I also tag by subject words.

The other technique I'm using is to bookmark everything I land on while I'm researching. In the past, I would remember visiting a site, but at the time I didn't think it was worth bookmarking, and then I had a hard time finding it again! Now I try to bookmark everything I read most of the way through. Now when something I've read is nagging at me, I can be pretty sure it's in my Diigo list somewhere, and my new combination of tags helps me find it.