Just as I emphasize with blogging and podcasting students and teachers, I myself always consider my audience and purpose when writing for this blog. My audience is busy educators and my purpose is to help teachers do their jobs. So I purposely don't overload this blog with frivolous details.

I spend a lot of time traveling, working with teachers, and experiencing the web. There are little tidbits I'd love to share, but this blog isn't the place. I've used several new web tools to publish another blog at tonyvincent.info:

Tumblr
Tumblr lets you set up a very simple blog. There are no frills like comments and advanced formatting. Blogs at Tumblr are called tumblelogs and you can start one for free. Tumblr has a really neat feature: you can have it automatically post items from any RSS feed. The folks at Tumblr even make it easy for you to point any domain name at your tumblelog. For $1.99 you can buy a name at registrars like GoDaddy.com. I've been waiting for a place to point tonyvincent.info and now I've found it. Like many blogs, there is an RSS feed and a scaled-down version for mobile devices.

Twitter
Twitter has been described as "microblogging." It encourages its users to answer the question What are you doing? You can answer the question on twitter.com, with software, through an instant message, or by a text message. Each entry can be no longer than 140 characters, making everything short and sweet. You can make friends on Twitter and have their entries forwarded to you with the same options as you have to post. Here is my Twitter page where you can become my friend and follow my updates. Twitter provides an RSS feed for each of its users, allowing my Twitter updates to be automatically posted to Tumblr.

Digg
Digg is a social news site where the users vote (called digging) on the top stories. Most articles posted on Digg are technology related. When I "digg" a story, it is placed on my user page and in an RSS feed that is posted on my tumblelog.

del.icio.us
del.icio.us may have a strange web address, but it's a fantastic social bookmarking site. You can store your bookmarks online to be accessed from any web browser. You can also share your bookmarks with others, which makes del.icio.us a great way to discover new things on the web. My del.icio.us bookmarks can be found here. An RSS feed allows my tumblelog to be updated each time I add a bookmark.

My tumblelog at tonyvincent.info brings together many pieces of my online life and is a much more personal blog than this one. It won't be as useful to you as this blog, but it will be updated much more often, thanks to RSS.

Labels: blogging