Social Networking

I’m not a user of social networking services. I’ve checked them out, sure, but I haven’t been interested in sharing my personal life online (just the opposite, in fact). This is fine because my friends, who are mostly the same vintage as me, don’t use them either. I felt a little behind the times at the Amsterdam Sakai Conference, where everybody seemed to be discussing Myspace/Facebook, posting pictures to Flickr or sharing links on del.icio.us (and this last one particularly stings, as I remember using the word, completely earnestly, in it’s traditional sense and got back a snicker and a reference to links…sigh :-)).

Anyways, the one exception is LinkedIn, where I seem to be somewhat more networked than the average Sakai community member. This is because I’ve been a user from the early days of LinkedIn, have been in the computer-based learning field for 20 years, and have moved organizations a few times. I am fairly discriminating about who I accept connections with. Most of my connections are people I’ve actually worked with directly at some point or another and, if someone asks, I would have something substantive to say about them.