Endnotes

Wow, what an experience. I thought I knew a lot, and I suppose I do compared to some, but I got a lot out of having to evaluate and test these things in an organized way. Most of what I saw was interesting, cool, and entertaining. Yet there's a lot that I'm not so sure about.

When you put together the masses and ask them to rate things, you'll get opinions in the middle of the bell curve. I haven't yet seen a social networking site that shows both the mean rating and the standard deviation (a measure of how widely dispersed the opinions are) of something. There's a lot of mediocrity in those ratings.

I'm also not a social animal; I don't get much enjoyment out of just linking with people. I already have a few close friends and am happy with those few. I'm not in the dating scene, so there's no attraction there. Also, when I want to know about something, I use the tools available to me (Google, especially) and find it on my own, often more efficiently than I can find it through a site that aggregates blogs, websites, tags, podcasts, or whatever. I also have no trouble keeping up with the few websites and feeds that interest me. I don't need a ton of stuff delivered automatically to my computer every day; that's just not the way I do things. I flit from one thing to another, only a very few of which have anything to do with a computer. It's like having too many magazine subscriptions and feeling pressured to read all of that stuff.

I also don't know how much networking really goes on. The sponsors of these sites are really, though they don't say it, interested in how often you visit and how long you stay, so they can charge more for advertising. If you come to a site repeatedly to add widgets, write blogs, upload photos, change templates, customize a blog, etc., that's as good to the site as it would be if you did none of that and actually communicated with other people. And I recognize that there are many people who do enjoy lots of socializing, connecting, networking, meeting people, etc. I have no problem with that; this is just my own personal slant.

On the positive side, the technology itself is just mind-blowing at times, and I do look at a few feeds and read the NY Times online, and download the occasional podcast for listening. I had a palace-ful of fun doing these tasks and exploring these tools and places. Some of the tools are a little useful, and perhaps I'll use a couple here and there--the experience was far from being a waste of my time. In fact, I'm very grateful to those who got us involved, did all the background work, set up the tech fair, invested the organization's time and resources, all to help us be better at our jobs and in our lives.