I’ve been checking out a lot of blog, social media, and video streaming sites lately to get a good grasp of what the “kids” are doing these days. I am a little chaotic right now, trying to remember where I am all over the web. If you want to see where I have been, here is my list and thoughts so far.

Twitter: @bwparis – Not really sure what the big deal is. I want to like it, but I just don’t. It is extremely easy to post now that I have the firefox plug-in and the iPhone app, but not really sure where is is better than tumblr.

Tumblr: brianparis.tumblr.com is a completely different story. I am a huge wordpress fan, so I didn’t really see any need for another blog platform. I went in with a negative attitude, but now am blown away. I love it. Not only is it a blog, but it is so much more. An aggressor of all of my sites: I am currently feeding it all of my unregimented.com post and my twitter tweets. A social network: this is twitter’s idea of following people done right. Instead of a list of short tweets with an unrecognizable URL, you can see real information posted by the people that you follow. Reposting: like something you see, tumblr makes it easy to repost it to your own site. Simplicity in reposting just the start. Putting up multi-media content is quick and simple also. You’ve got to love it when they make it easy for you.

Facebook: facebook.com/papaparis – I was a big fan of myspace (myspace.com/bwparis) back in the day I had a facebook account, but never checked it. Then about a year and a half ago, everyone was requesting to be friended on my facebook account. Pretty soon it seemed like no one was left on myspace, and everyone was contacting me on the facebook side. Facebook has grown slightly on me, but I am not in love. It is a nice place to see what people are doing, but I don’t understand the joy of giving virtual gifts and taking quiz after quiz.

Netvibes: netvibes.com/bwparis – an interesting idea of placing lots of source feeds into a nicely organized way. I use it as my home page, but don’t check it very often. I think that there is a lot of potential for use in an education environment. If a class has a central place where they can learn collaboratively, I think that would benefit all. I am working on ways that I can best use it in my work.

Post is getting long, so I will hold off on posting video sites until later, but just keep in mind that there is more than YouTube out there.