Neighbors Again...but the Digital Kind This Time

On Jan. 19th I wrote about how great the neighbors are in my area, especially in a snowstorm which can generally cause some frustrations of one kind or another around here. After going back to read over the post again, I began thinking about neighbors in a more global way.

Some of my best neighbors are the ones who write in their blogs. They're the neighbors who've helped me learn more through their experiences, understand more about technology in the classroom and discover all the new digital tools as they are found. Other neighbors are found through RSS feeds. They're the ones who are surfing the web and bookmarking sites in del.icio.us or Diigo and sharing them with the world.

I've been fiddling around a little bit more with Diigo lately but have been frustrated with their "blog this" feature. I just couldn't get it to work, couldn't figure out why not and couldn't find anything on the website that would help me solve the problem. So, today, one of my "neighbors" wrote a blog posting using that Diigo feature and I wrote a comment asking him to tell me how he had gotten it to work. A few short hours later I checked back on his blog and, sure enough, my good neighbor came through with what ended up being an extremely simple solution.

The best part of this story is that my neighbor, Clay Burrell, is in South Korea and I'm in New York State. In a digital world, our best neighbors are only a few mouse clicks and keystrokes away.