I thought I’d avoided the ‘5 favourite social media’ meme, but Danny kindly tagged me, so I’ll give it ago. The reason for avoidance? Erm, I’m not sure there’s anything particularly clever or interesting about my favourite five (I don’t rip, script, furl OR curl anything at all)… but here we go.
I love WordPress. Unsurprisingly. It powers this blog, and allows integration with all sorts of other cool things – including del.icio.us, Flickr, Last.fm, Amazon and more, thanks to some cool plugins.
I love Wikipedia. I’m one of those people who likes to know a little about a lot of things, most of the time, and occasionally a lot about a few, and the articles on Wikipedia invariably provide a useful starting point.
I love RSS. I love my RSS readers slightly less: Feedreader is good and is my desktop client of choice. What I really want is something that syncs with an online service so that threads I’ve marked as read on one are marked as read on the other, and so that I don’t have to subscribe to the same feed more than once. Does Newsgator do this? I’ll look into it at some point. Oh, my online RSS reader of choice is Bloglines, and I do like the way that public blogrolls can be shared on there. I should get into all this OPML stuff too…
I like del.icio.us a lot — currently more for my own edification than its social nature (I only have two people in my network) — but as someone who’s (1) never bothered to use bookmarks and (2) who likes to blog one-liners, it gives me good scope to find links I want to again and be pithy about amusing websites. The linklog on the right, btw, is powered by del.icio.us.
And for number 5? I guess Skype might win that one; admittedly it’s a long way from perfect, and arguable to what extent it constitutes ‘media’ as its output isn’t necessarily public… but its a great bit of social software, and there’s potential there (I read some good tips on Simon’s blog on how to record Skype conversations – something which may come in handy…!).
So there you have it. Tags? Don’t think Chris, Tom, Gareth, Ben or, erm, Neil Gaiman have done this (why not ask?). Share and enjoy, folks, share and enjoy.