Over the years I’ve accumulated more than 1,000 links in http://delicious.com/smithjd.   Delicious (in its various versions) was my preferred tool  for storing,  retrieving, and sharing bookmarks.  Far better than bookmarking things in a browser.  But I’ve gotten impatient with the delicious browser widget in Chrome (and the website was just too much overhead) so I […]

Face-to-face conferences aren’t what they used to be and that’s ok with me.   How many times have you gone to a face-to-face conference in another city where you rub shoulders with a lot of strangers, listen to a bunch of talking heads with obscure PowerPoint slides in cold dark rooms, make a few acquaintances […]

Tags: face-to-face, tagging

One of my challenges in talking about communities and technology is that I’m more committed and passionate about “doing it” than talking about it.  Despite getting introduced by the likes of Ward Cunningham as “a researcher,” I’m always more interested in trying to change how we participate in a conversation than in standing on the […]

Tags: experiments

Almost 10 years ago I decided to focus full time on communities of practice and pretty much everything I’ve done professionally ever since then has revolved around that one subject.  I’ve learned a lot about how to support and understand communities and even gotten better at explaining what I do to for a living other […]

It’s really great when special-purpose websites are mashed together.  The effect is multiplicative.  For example, Twemes.com, although it has a really ugly pattern for a background, is elegant and simple and combines: “Tweets” from twitter.com that have a particular hashtag Photos from flickr.com that have the same hashtag links from delicious.com that have that same […]

Tags: flickr, mashups, twemes, twitter

The Tech FAQ At the Tech FAQ, the technical answers you have been looking for are answered in detail, yet in a way the average person can understand. (tags: technology faq dictionary howto hacks)