Andi Narvaez: Re-learning PR

Join me here, as I live blog the Fourth Annual “Innovations in Teaching and Learning” Conference at University of Maryland. I’ll be live blogging and tweeting as often as I can with the #ITL_UMD and #SMCEDU hashtags. This is my first live blogging experience so please bear with me. I hope you can participate with your comments and tweets! Below is a little information about the conference but you can click here to learn more and view the program. See you all in a few hours!

This post was in the works from the moment I created this blog.

I finally found a name for the blog that is something other than my name. I know, my name is still on there… I can explain.

My name was a good place to start off with for the blog in order to bring my Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook… you-name-it accounts back to the same place and have it all make some sense. But never, for a moment, did I think that it would be  the sole thing to let those who might read the blog  know what it was about. Assuming, of course, that anything I might have to say would ever interest anyone.

Remember The Jetsons? Yeah you do. I won’t prolong this then…

I wish I had taken bets back in the day to try to guess which of the futuristic gadgets featured on the show would make it in the real world first.

To be honest, my money would have been on the housekeeper robots.

However, yesterday I caught a tweet about 12seconds.tv, which is basically a video version of Twitter. Brilliant concept. Today I read a post on Mashable about  YouTube adding social networking capabilities. Right on. And minutes before I posted this I learned about Fliggo.

Today was Google’s.

Everywhere I turned, the one thing I kept hearing people talking about was the new Google Latitude feature on mobile Google maps and iGoogle gadgets. The service is available in 27 countries and allows users to let others know where in the world they are located. If you choose to opt-in (because that would be the only way Google could ever get away with this) you can use Latitude to find friends and communicate with them via SMS, Google Talk or simply by dialing their phone number.

My friend told me about this because she new I posted about the same topic earlier.

A friend was at a club and was approached by the proud owner of an iPhone who asked her what her favorite flower was and disappeared after she answered “lilies”. He returned moments later with a sketch of a lily he drew using an application I think might be Sketchinz but I’m not completely sure.

These were his words, “Here is a lily, let me get your e-mail and I’ll send it to you.”

Today I tried TweetDeck and went back to Twhirling almost immediately. I could tell right off the bat that the simplicity and basic functions of Twhirl were less threatening to my productivity at work and life in general, thus I opted to opt right out of Tweedeck (no offense).

My feed gets a massive dose of blogs daily that talk about the latest applications, sites, updates and online tools available to all web users, which as of last week include even my grandmother in Quito, Ecuador, the unchallenged epitome of the phrase “out of the loop”… or so I thought. 

The new pick-up line

The Friday after Thanksgiving a few friends and I went to Mantus Lounge, a very posh club in Dallas that, regretfully, people seem to frequent more for its poshness than for the DJ/owner’s unmatched (according to me at least) ability to mix songs seamlessly and almost effortlessly. 

It was while scoping out the dance floor that I witnessed one way in which new media and technology have changed ways in which people interact with each other, even face-to-face.