Three (or four) sites you should start with

So, with the stunning array of things that are out there, where should you get started?

1) www.myspace.com/ is the first place you should go. It has gotten a lot of bad press, but nothing else is quicker and easier to get in touch with a lot of people. It is also easy to start a blog, add pictures, etc. etc. Most college students, and many high school students have already done this. It is very easy to network with people using myspace.

(optional - some college students use www.facebook.com more, and that would be the place to go. My observations is that I see about 3 students using myspace for every one that uses facebook)

2) http://del.icio.us/ is the place to save bookmarks. Don't remember whether you saved a book mark at home, at work or somewhere else. Get an account at del.icio.us and save all your bookmarks there. Then you will always have them, and you can see how often other people have bookmarked them as well.

And, you can "tag" your bookmarks as whatever you want to "travel", "eng101", "toread", etc.

Then, the tagged items can become a live URL for you to give to people to see what you are interested in. I'm working on a brownbag about web 2.0 things, so you can see what I'm pointing to at http://del.icio.us/queequeg83/brownbag/ where "queequeg83" is my user name (can you guess I was an english major?) and brownbag is the tag.

3) http://www.flickr.com is the place to share visual images. Not necessarily pictures, but screen dumps, power point slides, maps, scans, etc. etc. You can also "tag" pictures with your own phrases to make them easier for you, and everyone else to find. Don't know where to start, look at the most "interesting" pictures of the last 7 days http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ or search for a topic of interest "kentucky" or "transylvania" or "saxophone".

What makes all of these more powerful and interesting is that you don't just look at things: you interact with them. You can leave comments on people's myspace pages, or suggest new web pages to other del.icio.us users, or tell people they have great pictures on flickr.

Take some time now to set up an account with at least one of these three. Or all three (or four).

Want to go further? Visit http://30boxes.com for an online shared calendar or http://www.writely.com to write collaboratively online or vist http://web2.0awards.org/ for more sites.