One of my favorite edubloggers (who resides in a folder for Experts in my reader) has set up a new location for his blog. That’s right friends, David Jakes, expert at Digital Storytelling Guru (just to name a few of his many educational tech skills/expertise) has created a new web presence and moved his blog The Strength of Weak Ties to a new home. Gone is the unforgiving blogger tape across the top, as he is no longer using the blogger service. It’s now a Wordpress theme and hosted under his own domain. Quite impressive. Some of you know I’m looking to relocate too, so I’m especially watching others who are doing the same thing. I will get to talk shop with David Jakes, whom I consider a friend (right now only in the virtual sense, but soon–@Educon2.0 January 25-27–I’ll be able to say he is a friend in the truest sense.) W00T!! Jakes is coming to South Carolina in June for our Upstate Technology Conference in Greenville, SC, and I almost feel like I am the reason he is coming. Well not really just me but allow me to explain. You see, some of the organizers of that conference were at SC EdTech back in October, and they were asking for a presenter who might consider being their (Greenville, SC Upstate Technology Conference) keynote. Since I’m on the planning board for SC EdTech, I was at the information desk when that conversation took place. Knowing those folks fairly well, I joined in the conversation. Tim Van Huele and Jeff McCoy asked if anyone had an idea of who might would come, and I suggested David Jakes. I told them to research him, and that I knew for a fact that Jakes did keynotes and sessions at many educational technology conferences. Well what do you know, but Jakes is coming to SC! I don’t know how big a part I played in him coming this June, but I will take some of the credit. I hope to see him face to face there too. So now I’ll have at least three opportunities to hang out with Jakes: Chris Lehmann’s Educon2.0 in Philadelphia, Greenville’s Upstate Technology Conference, and NECC in San Antonio. 
Maybe I can get the goods on how to select a host for my online presence.
I first met Jakes at EdubloggerCon in Atlanta. He led some of the conversations, and really challenged my thinking about digital storytelling among other things. Then I befriended him in Twitter, and discovered he had worked early in his career less than a year here in SC, down in the lower state. I sort of rode on his coat tails virtually during Alan November’s Building Learning Communities Conference during the summer, blogging about it several times. I also blogged about joining him virtually at New York’s TechForum. You can read those posts here, here, and here.
You meet all kinds in the bloggospher and twitter. (See the screenshot of a few o my Twitter friends?) They could turn out to be life-long friends, some of ‘em, even if only in the virtual sense. Okay, so this one was too long too. I’m working on it. And it is still not Jan. 1 so I have another couple of days before I must adhere to my personal goal of shorter posts. Some things just can’t be shared in brief posts.
Attribution:
Image: ‘Down on the corner‘
www.flickr.com/photos/21787159@N00/324191327
Image: ‘Twitterfriends_dec07‘
www.flickr.com/photos/c_nelson/2149390049/
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