The last month or so I’ve been trying to actually get into the whole “Web 2.0″ (I don’t like the term by the way) world. I know it’s old news, and it’s not like it’s new to me either. I just recently thought about all the web applications that seem to be so popular that I have dormant accounts on, the main ones are;

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Flickr
• del.icio.us

Facebook, well, that’s taken MySpace’s place as the social network I only passively interact with. The other three are of more interest to me, so I’ve decided to try and use them for something useful.

Flickr is a fairly easy one, I have a large collection of digitized photographs spanning a few years which are for the most part sorted/tagged thanks to F-Spot which has the ability to sync with many popular image hosting sites including Flickr and Google’s Picasaweb. So I am gradually building the on-line collection, I initially intended to just dump the lot on there (if only as a backup) but then realised that there are a few too many GB for that.

Del.icio.us I get, but as someone who has never been a big collector of bookmarks, I don’t find too useful. My bookmarks in my browser have always been a mess, mainly because they are all just temporary. Any site I visit on a regular basis for any extended period of time, I know the address for (or at least know a good google query to find it). But, in the spirit of my trying to “giving it a go” I installed the firefox extension and added my “recent bookmarks” to this page using the wordpress plugin (over there on the right somewhere). I must say I’m using it more, but still not a great deal.

Twitter is an oddity to me, it seems incredibly popular; in spite of it’s apparent unreliability. To me it seems to sit somewhere between a very slow IRC and a short message mailing list. I think the only advantage I can see is that it can work mobile, though I’ve not had much luck keeping that working for more than a day or two. Most other people who have complained about “Not Getting It” when it comes to Twitter seem to be told to install a desktop client, as it is much more conducive to regular use than the website. So, I diligently installed Spaz, an Adobe Air based client, which means I now get little popups telling me when someone “tweets”. That makes it more convenient, so far it hasn’t made it more interesting.

Although all the tools are very cool, maybe this “Social Web” thing just isn’t for me. Then again, maybe it’s this whole “Social” thing that just doesn’t work for me

Sixty Second Tech is a (relatively) new podcast by prominent Zender Cal Evans that promises to be the "Cure to BSS"

Sixty Second Tech is the only known cure for “Blank Stare Syndrome” (BSS). BSS happens when one of your technical friends starts talking to you and unconsciously slips into geek speak. They don’t realize they’ve triggered BSS until long after your eyes glaze over. BSS is an embarrassing condition but a curable one, just spend one minute a week listening to Sixty Second Tech.

While I am definitely on the side of the "technical friends", the short podcasts — almost exactly 1 minute each, quite impressive — are a great way to provoke thought about aspects of technology that may not otherwise have been brought to the fore, but probably should be; such as Wordpress as a CMS, OpenID and Google Alerts
But, my favourite is pointing anyone who speaks to me about "SEO" to the episode "Go Relevant or Go Home!"; which sums up very succinctly the folly of the whole practice.

His name is Cal Evans, and he is my sixty second tech.