Sue Waters

As mentioned in previous post Gabriella (Despre chestii din viata (cu si fara tehnologie) in Romania and I have been informally networking with one another through our blogs; which to me has been a really amazing example of how social networking can cross language barriers and great distances.

While Gabriela can read English, I can not read Romanian and yet each day I follow the great links on her sites and learn so much from what she shares with me. And she follows my blog, wiki, podcasts and checks what I have bookmarked each day in del.icio.us. Then bookmarks the items that interest her using her del.icio.us account. This is a classic example of what Sean O’Driscoll is calling “author drafting” on his blog Community Group Therapy. Sean describes author drafting as following behind a “fast rider” you already know tags topics you care about and you are “drafting” behind them. This is the strategy on my wiki site I call building your network and fans when using del.icio.us; so instead of searching for articles, others do the searching for you (however I really like Sean’s name for it).

In some ways it is like we follow in each others foot steps. And if you carefully read back between each of our postings it is like she reads my mind and knows what topic I am researching and posts a great link to help me out. Reality, that is probably what she is doing. She subcribes to my feeds from my different sites and they give her an idea of what I am working on. So thanks Gabriella for thanking me, in English, for all the wonderful educational resources I share with the World however I also thank you for everything that I gain from you.

My friend Frances, did the translation into Romanian, using an online translator, we hope we have translated it correctly. You have given me “True World Fame”, and the same for you, because my blog is on the other side of the world from you and it is amazing that it is read by someone whose native language is not English.

P.S I know that you will have already checked out RSS in plain English but if you haven’t definitely worth it. If it is not working please be patient – he has had technical difficulties with his site (probably as a result of his “fantastic snow day” – i.e. the video has been very well received) in which case I would go back and watch in a few days. Poor Lee reports he is still having technical difficulties, thankfully he has also put on youtube because that will probably help some of his problems (which I am sure are because his site was so overwhelmed – well done Lee – enjoy the snow – however working fine in Google Reader). So I have embedded the video here for you to watch.

Interesting point Lee tells you to locate the RSS feed and paste into Google Reader (and it is important that he shows people how to locate RSS feed). However with Google Reader, if there is an RSS feed on the page, you do not even have to locate the feed all you have to do is paste the web address into add subscription and normally Google Reader will all automatically locate the feed.