Regarding chocolate - thinking may have to give away my secret weapons (chocolate and coke)cause someone has been enjoying them tooooo much (but not enough to start running!).

RSS definitely should be a priority — yet it is such a hard concept to get people used to and start using.

Thanks for sharing that link– I’ve seen it referenced but hadn’t actually read it before/yet– now I am!

RSS and aggregators really are “basic ingredients” for learning today I think, I agree with you they are unsung and generally unacknowledged by many for their power. I’m going to add RSS aggregators to my list of “basic ingredients” for digital learning which I linked up today for my skype presos this week: “Creating, Collaborating and Blending Learning in the 21st Century Infovers.”

I’ve been using this approach, monitoring my @cogdog tweets in Google Reader, described bottom of post
http://cogdogblog.com/2008/01/09/better-tweeter/

It makes a huge difference in being connected to people who follow you. I would hate to tweet someone a specific message and not get a response. Sometimes, when I do this, I find it is someone I want to add to my followers.

But it potentially would allow you to reply to people w/o necessarily following them.

I run a bunch of similar feeds for monitoring sites; RSS for my flickr comments, changelogs from wiki sites, etc.

Web 2.0 may be sexy, but an understanding of how to leverage RSS is the one thing I wish more people had. It is the unsung hero of the small pieces loosely joined web world.

There is no way I can follow all the posts to twitter of the folks I’m following, similar to the RSS feeds I subscribe to now. I find twitter is wonderful when I want to check in, but it is not something I leave on all the time or am tuned into constantly. I’m not sure what the right analogy for this is… It does mean that if someone messages me directly, I may not see the message for awhile. I’m checking my replies a couple times per week now, but not every day. If people need to contact me about something urgent I’m hoping (as suggested on my contact form that they use the phone or skype. For less urgent matters and conversations I’m finding the asynchronous as well as synchronous functionality of Twitter to be wonderful. Twitter is also good for urgent/time sensitive matters when you need input or help, but not necessarily from a specific person (since they may not be “on.”) Twitter is certainly an interesting and different communications platform, full of possibilities but also unique in many ways. I’m glad to see the tool is continuing to evolve and improve. It’s great the collective imaginations of the Twitter community are helping to make it better. In this way I think Twitter personifies many of the best things about 21st century communications possibilities.