Monday, 31 January 2011

Don't keep your cool - share it

At the PMR hackfest I met a number of people who were doing cool stuff...but I hadn't heard. Usually these things get posted somewhere and then, if sufficiently cool, they get shared around the web on FriendFeed, blogs, Twitter, etc. and everyone (interested!) finds out about them. But it has to be put on the web somehow in the first place...

Here's why you should tell people about cool stuff you're doing:
  • People want to hear about it
  • It's nice to hear that someone finds your stuff cool
  • It might be useful to someone
  • It's good publicity for you
  • Someone else might take your idea and do something even cooler

There are lots of ways of sharing this type of information. One of the easiest is a blog. If you think of a blog as essentially a cheap way to generate web pages you can see what I'm talking about. It takes about 10 seconds to set up a blog (at http://www.blogger.com for example) so there's no excuse.

As an example of something cool I found out about - about a year ago, Dan Hagon et al integrated TwirlyMol into Google Wave so that twirlying around was propagated by Wave action (the video explains all):

3 comments:

Jan Jensen said...

Couldn't agree more!

A few days before your post, I started at group blog to expose people here to blogging. Although 2 of my students already started blogs of their own (here and here).

Noel O'Boyle said...

Your students have great blogs - tell them to keep it up in the new year! :-)

Markus Sitzmann said...

Oh, Dan connected me because the day he presented this (somewhere) the Resolver was down (the only day since it has started) ... but we fixed it before the presentation. I should have told you - I thought you know him :-)