This was a fun topic. I was interested to explore all the different categories and was pleased to see that in the course of Learning 2.0 I had explored quite a few of them already. Certainly it gave me lots to go back later and explore. With the Organize category it helped me with my frustration in the previous task with Zoho. For this task, I decided to focus on social networking tools and joined up Facebook.
Like many of the other tools I have explored here, I knew and had talked about Facebook but no action! So I signed up and used it to explore the profiles of various politicians, as I was doing it yesterday between voting and watching the election results. This is a link to my local member, Linday Tanner's Facebook. It was interesting to explore the different categories of "friends" he has, to watch his Youtube, and to see his photographs. I was particularly interested to see that we shared some favourite films and TV, and indeed that Kevin Rudd and I did too. Kevin 07 is also fond of Vivaldi, and has a cat named Jasper, so the Hecuba in me liked that. John Howard seems not to have used this tool in his electioneering, though there are some made up profiles for him.
I am amazed at the number of links to others that are available using Lindsay's Facebook as an example. I could link to see who else was at his address, who else had a Master of Arts, who else had Life of Brian as a favourite film just to give a very few examples. Facebook has lots of potential for developing communities of interest. I made a few additions to my stump of a profile and found that there were a few people on Facebook who had breast cancer as an interest, and others who are interested in family history and/or local history.
For comparison purposes, I also took a look at MySpace and of course checked out the topical, namely Kevin Rudd and his Kevin 07 campaign. Kevin's MySpace site seemed to provide a bit more scope than the Facebook site in terms of customization. You could also search and view the sites without signing up, though you couldn't comment. This was a disadvantage with Facebook.
In terms of my aim to discover tools that are potentially of use for local history at Boroondara, I will have to think about this further. Obviously as individuals need to join personally, I am not sure what the extended use could be. Yes, one could use it to develop communities of interest, say in the history of Hawthorn. But I tried adding "History of Collingwood" to my Facebook profile and ended up with lots of people who were interested in the Collingwood Football Club as well as History. So I think the usefulness of this tool for local history needs a bit of reflection. But it is good that I have finally signed up and now know more hands on stuff about Facebook and MySpace. At the very least, I can now use this information to make an informed decision when next we talk about it in terms of local history at Boroondara.
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