2 years ago, he talked to me about a custom url shortener he had installed on his server. Sounded cool but I wasn't ready to invest time into getting it installed. Last year he talked to me about it again, because I asked about it. I thought specifically the ability to track these links and clickthroughs seemed interesting and useful information. Sites like bit.ly do the same but I think anytime you can own your own stuff, whether it's a domain or website, that's good move. D'arcy Norman's taking this idea to its fullest in his latest pursuits of ownership. 

Anyway, I sometimes get in this geeky mood and want to roll up my sleeves and use things like FTP, MySQL and config files. Truth is I barely know what those things are but sometimes force myself to be geeky because it's good for me. 

So I managed to install the thing on my server and short of had it working. What it does is take your existing domain, in my case I chose my shareski.ca domain as opposed to ideasandthoughts.org because it's shorter and also is a little more recognizable. Both domains and sites reside on the same server so it didn't matter which I chose. I created a separate directory for my URLs to live. I thought I had installed it correctly but somehow all my shortened URLs were pointing back to shareski.ca You do that about 3 times and you're officially a spammer. So I left it and got Dr. Craft to take a look at it. (How awesome is that you can give someone full access to your server and he just fixes it?) I think my config file was pooched. (see definition 5) Chris I owe you a breakfast in Philly. 

Whatever he did it now works. What I'm able to do is create bookmarklets to shorten automatically or create custom shortened URLs to share. Great for workshops, twitter and elsewhere. You can tell if your share a link with a specific group, how many may have opened it.  The URLs stay with me and the tracking feature is pretty nice. After a few days using it, here are my overall results:

You can also see where your traffic comes from.

I also am using a WordPress plugin that auto generates a shortened URL and auto posts to twitter. There are probably other features that I'm not aware of yet but I think it's certainly good thing to explore if you have access to a server. 

If you use tweetdeck you can include it as your default shortener. The instructions to do that are here. Lots of other little add ons and tools that you might find useful. 

I've not wrtten ia post about a tool in a long time. Mostly because I usually don't think about it that much and other people do a better job writing about it than I do anyway. But I've been using If This, Then That for a few months and quite like how it's helped my work flow. Will asked a few of us how we're using it and rather than try and cram it in a few tweets figured I could blog about it. Blogging is quite lovely thing for stuff like this.

Let me share the tasks I've set up and why I use them..

One I hardly if ever use. I'm not very active on Facebook and really only have a presence there because of family. I thought I might occasionally have tweets using a #fb tag to go their but I never think of it. May be I wll someday. 

There's some controversy around this task. A few people I know, have thought this is kind of any "icky" thing. I get that, but after some thought I think it's useful. While it is a generic message to all new followers, it does make sure they are clear how I use twitter. Many expect me to be all serious and post awesome links all day. Instead they find I don't and perhaps at first glance think it's useless, which I admit it might be. This is the DM they receive:

FYI, I tweet about learning but I also tweet silly stuff. I do it purposefully. http://t.co/ITuMf5Y Nice to meet you.

So far I like it and have received feedback that many like it. Some I'm sure don't but I do think it's a way of establishing trust and transparency. I'm even toying with the idea of a video intro. Not to send them to my stuff or anything but simply to explain to people the way I use twitter. 

Just a way to capture favorite tweets. I even specify a notebook and tag for the tweet to fall into. 

I'm still a big google reader guy so this is a fast way to tweet good stuff in my reader. I do have to use the "add a note" part of GR otherwise it's just a link with no context. 

This is the way I largely use facebook My daily photo of the day gets posted. It's actually made me go there more as people will often comment on the pictures. One thing that's weird is it often uses the wrong thumbnail inside Facebook. Not sure why. 

The difference between this one and the other one that goes to Evernote, is that it only grabs favorite tweets that contain a link. The reason I make it private is because I don't really want the tweet, I just want the link. I'll strip out the tweet and make the link public. I need a way to streamline this because it's an extra step at this point. 

I use Evernote to build presentations and I'll star items in GR that I want to explore for presentations. 

If I could find a way to post back to Google Plus, i might use it more. This one posts to twitter from Google plus. I'm not a big plus user yet but this might serve me well at some point. Really would like to be able to get content into plus. 

Not sure I need this one as i tweet out new videos but as my tweet says, "you might see it on my blog soon" Most of the videos I post to youtube I end up blogging about anyway. I may scrap this one.

So there are 10 recipes/tasks I'm currently using. I'm still getting to know all the options of ifttt but I really think it's got big potential. 

In the spirit of blogging about 3 years ago, I'm going to tag some ifttt users to write about their tasks. I'd like to learn more.

Will Richardson

Danika Barker

Doug Peterson

Royan Lee

Jim Pedrech

Brian Ball

I actually forget how these memes work but if you're a ifttt using please blog about it and link back here so we can easily gather all the various uses. 

As this article states, the problem of attention isn’t particularly new but it certainly is becoming more and more an issue. I remember teachers back in the 1980′s lamenting that they felt they were competing with the MTV generation. MTV seems pretty tame and managable compared to what we are dealing with today.

There aren’t too many days that go by that someone doesn’t ask me about "keeping up". I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers.  Even highly connected and media savvy folks struggle. I struggle with it too, but I have developed a few beliefs, principles that have been helpful to me. I’ll avoid the "top 5" or "best ways to" kind of approach and simply share a few things I think can be helpful in a day of attention deficits.

Filters

As an avid reader of Clay Shirky, the most important lesson I’ve learned from him is about filter failure. As he so eloquently states, it’s not information overload it’s filter failure. We’ve always lived with an abundance of information. Our libraries were filled with books we never read, movies we never saw and conversations we never had. Today, it’s mostly access that makes us feel like it’s too much. In that past we just weren’t as bombarded with information. It took work to go to the library. We had to physically go to see people. Today we carry around our friends and the bulk of human knowledge in our pockets.

While search engines are getting better and better at filtering information, I prefer human powered search. Three places where that happens for me are:

• Delicious I’ve got 29 people whose daily readings come directly to me. I could have 100 people, I could have 5. I can change these 29 people but the point is most of what they find is of interest to me. They are weeding out the junk to give me what they think is noteworthy.
• Google Reader While I subscribe to over 300 sites but the shared portion of Google Reader is the one place I’ll check everyday. 55 people who share the best of what they find in their reading is pretty much all I need.
• Twitter A bit more random but yet potentially very valuable, usually I find great stuff in the conversations. Great links usually get retweeted. If you just check RTs you won’t miss much

Simply the Complex

Information and technology can seem very complex but in the end, it’s important to distill and synthesize. This is why the Common Craft videos are so popular. The LeFevers have taken the time to take some pretty complex technologies and make them simple. One of the ways I attempt to synthesize is to blog. Writing often helps me figure out what is really important. When educators reject using technology in the classroom it’s often because they think it’s too complicated. What they fail to do is determine for themselves what the key ideas are. Digital Storytelling is a great example. There are upteen dozen ways to tell stories but in the end, it’s always about good storytelling. We can spend lots of time examining the intracacies of using media but without a good story, it doesn’t matter. That’s not to say that simple means easy, it just means it doesn’t have to be that hard to understand. Once you have a clear understanding of a topic, you can more easily sift through irrelevant material and noise.

The Hedgehog Principle

Jim Collin’s book Good to Great talks about success among business who deploy the hedgehog principle. In a nutshell it’s the idea of finding your niche or what your focus is and sticking with it. Other companies, in his examples, often get distracted and sidetracked working on things that aren’t part of the core of the company. Instead, he says, find out what you’re good at and stick with it. Now you can argue this idea to some extent but in today’s world, we have to set limits on ourselves. So at some point you have to decide what where you want to develop your expertise and focus your attention. When the latest and greatest tool or resource comes your way, you need to be prepared to pass on it from time to time.  I tend to rely on others to become experts for me. Simply knowing that someone else can be a resource, relieves me from having to know all there is to know. I never would have anyways but limiting the discussions and ideas that I pursue is of great value.

Another resource that I think about a lot when it comes to dealing with choices and focusing on a few things is the great TED talk by Barry Schwartz called The Paradox of Choice. This video has been very important for me in understanding the greatest of our time as well as the challenges. If you haven’t seen it, watch it, or maybe even watch it again. After watching it again, I’m adding another principle that feeds off of this one.

Sometimes Good Enough, is Good Enough

Dave Weinberger talks a lot sometimes settling for "good enough’. That notion rubs many people the wrong way, in particular educators. Most teachers spend hours telling their students to always do their best and while this is certainly a valid trait we want to instill, at times, we have to settle for good enough. When it comes to information, this is very true. When you get 3 million search results, sometimes you settle. Wikipedia is often good enough. It’s not perfect but most of the work we do and understanding we are needing doesn’t have to be. Again, this isn’t always the case but learning how and when to accept good enough is a badly needed skill. I find this particularly true when I’m searching for an image on flickr. With over 3 billion photos finding an image that depicts an idea isn’t usually that hard, finding the perfect one is. Even the image I’m using on this post could be better, but it’s good enough.

Snacking versus Eating

For me, this is most challenging. I could spend a great deal of time snacking on twitter. While there are many quality ideas, resources and conversations shared, it’s still a snack. I hadn’t thought about it in terms of time and money but this quote from the Globe and Mail article explains it:

The cost of one’s time (approximated, for example, by the average wage) relative to the cost of data manipulation, transmission and storage has increased roughly 10-million-fold in just over two generations – a change in relative “prices” utterly without precedent. This, above all, is what is driving the evolution of online behaviour and culture, with profound implications for the production and consumption of knowledge. The primary consequence is the growing emphasis on speed at the expense of depth.

I like speed and like quick but I have to discipline myself to dig deep. I need to be able to move from a 140 character blurb, to a link-filled blog post, to an essay to a book. It’s not easy but like trying to eat well, I know what’s good for me.  I like a bag of chips as much as the next guy but as a steady diet, you need to peel the potatoes and cook them (even better if you can grow them yourself). Sure it takes more time but it’s way better for you in the long run.

No question that how we manage information and how we teach students to manage it will be a huge part of our lives. It is already. I refuse to engage in conversations about "the good old days" in which we usually look back and attribute fonder and more positive memories about the past that we grew up in. It doesn’t really matter anyway. It’s never going to be like that. If, however, you want to discuss timeless values and characteristics that may be forgotten at times, that’s worth my time. I hope these are some timeless principles that I can get better at implementing.

• have no interest
• find it interesting and compelling and need to comment
• am inspired enough to write my own blog post
• think others would benefit and I either share or email the post to them
• consider it interesting but know that it will require more time to process

So given these responses I:

• skim over and it’s automatically marked as read (some consider this deleting)
• head over to the blog and make a comment
• link to it in a blog post
• hit the share button or email button
• star it and read it later

I also try to read my feeds 2 or 3 times a day. I remember a certain blogger (initials W.R.) who showed his reader in a presentation only to have  oodles of unread posts appear from a fellow blogger in the audience. He was admittedly embarrassed.

So, grant it, email may be harder but for some people, their aggregator has become a challenge and almost as taxing as email. It shouldn’t be but if we’re interested in deep learning, it means spending a lot of time in the aggregator. For many of us, our aggregator is more important than email.

PS. my inbox is at 11.

[tags]merlinmann,inboxzero,43folders,rss[/tags]