Thing 23: The Home Stretch...

Wrap-Up:
My favorite parts of this journey were the ones that involved using RSS feeds in different ways. I am an avid user of Google Reader now. In the past, I had this humongous list of sites that I tried to visit every few days, and I didn't always know where the new stuff was. Now I can visit everyone who has new content every day, if I like. In the case of "The Brick Testament," sometimes the new content was rather buried, and I had no idea how to find the new stuff without digging a little. I never have miss "The News From Lake Wobegone," or "CarTalk" anymore, because it's ready for me when I'm ready now. I don't have to remember these things anymore.

This program has given me tools to free up my brain to accomplish other tasks. I keep thinking of how writing freed up the human memory for other tasks. We are certainly evolving, all within a couple generations.

I liked being able to do the fun things. I didn't expect it to be as much fun as it was. And even though it was "play," the outcome was an understanding of concepts that could have been pretty dry (mashups, for example).

There were little snag here and there that had to be worked out. For example, users were required to an additional level of registration in order to make their Bloglines public. That wasn't all that obvious. The location of the Flickr mashups wasn't as obvious to the very beginner as it might have been. But these things were all worked out in the end.

I would most certainly participate in another discovery program like this. I need to stay "in the know" because of the type of work I do. I would say to other users who haven't jumped on the bandwagon: "Please do this. You will thank me, and yourself." The difference between using 1.0 and 2.0 technology is like the difference between walking on all fours and walking on two legs. Evolve, people! Free up your hands to do other tasks, like building fires! (sorry...I was a biology major once).