in-between thing: ning

Going straight from Thing 1 to Thing 21 was not my idea. But as it happens, I'm attending the Midwest Library Technology Conference this week, and they asked us to join Ning. So after a bit of clicking about--how much of my real identity do I want for this account, what privacy policy, click where?--I now seem to be successfully Ninged. I even managed to work my brand-new avatar into Ning, although I ended up downloading the file and then cropping it. If Ning says what they're looking for in photo sizes, I haven't seen that yet.

So all that effort, and then it looks like not much is happening on the conference site. Something to check back on before the conference, I suppose.

Thing 1: Beginning Blogging

Or Beginning Blogging and Avatars to be more accurate. I think most of my energy went into trying to create the avatar. Who would have thought a casual outfit of jeans and a plain sweatshirt, or shorts and a t-shirt (the kind of clothes I envisioned my avatar wearing) would be so hard to pull together? I can feel the cataloging instinct kicking in: I was dismayed to realize that I was going to have to click through 60-odd pages to see all the possible outfits for my avatar--doesn't this just cry out for a better system of organization? Any organization at all would be an improvement. Tagging, maybe.

Blogging? Well, I'll get back to y'all about whether I like it or not. At the moment, it feels like writing a letter to a vast mass of strangers, and that feels unnatural as all get-out. Heck, if I'm going to write letters, I have friends who'd love to hear from me.

23 Things on a Stick? Sounds like a good idea. I've already tried some of the things on the list (LibraryThing = yay! Del.icio.us = uh, whatever), but I could've drifted for years more without trying blogging and who knows if I'd've ever gotten around to sampling Facebook or MySpace. (Did I just commit myself to making it that far through this program? Uh-oh).