Katkin’s weBLOG

‘Twas the night before the end of EDES 501,

when all through the blogosphere

Not a microblog was tweeting, not even at Technorati;

The folksonomies were hung by the portal with care,

In hopes that Will Richardson soon would be there;

The bloggers were nestled all snug in their weblogs,

While visions of tag clouds danced in their sidebars;

And mama on Diigo, and I on Delicious,

Had just added bookmarks for the socially ambitious,

When there on the screen there arose such a Twitter,

I sprang from my edublog to see what was the matter.

Away to the Windows I flew like a flash drive,

Tore open my photostream and uploaded my pics.

The text on the page of the new-written post

Launched a clustrmap of readers, from coast to coast

When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,

But a miniature aggregator, and eight tiny live feeds,

With a little old avatar, so lively and wiki,

I knew in a moment it must be Picnik.

More rapid than RSS his cursors they came,

And he blogged, and he posted, and called them by name;

‘Now Warlick! now, Davis! now, Lefever and Johnson!

On, Valenza! On, Tapscott! on Yucht and Berners-Lee!

To the top of the site! to the top of the page!

Now hyperlink! hyperlink! hyperlink all!’

As YouTube videos embed code in your post,

Common Craft created, are those we paste most;

So up to the URL, the gurus they flew,

With an archive of tools, and Joanne de Groot too.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard through the Ning

The viewing and sharing on LibraryThing.

As I drew in my head, and was surfing around,

Down the browser Will came with a bound,

He was dressed all in Firefox, from his header to his footer,

and his readers were those of a faithful iGoogler.

A bundle of apps he had flung on his back,

And he looked like a web-master, just clearing the cache.

His widgets-how they twinkled! his blogroll how merry!

His html was now visual, his plug-ins so varied!

His droll little mouth was drawn up to record,

A podcast to share, both near and afar;

The tip of a mic he held tight in his teeth,

while Audacity played back the track underneath;

He had a broad Facebook and a little round belly,

That spammed when he laughed, like a bowlful of digital jelly.

He was social and connected, a right networked old elf,

and I laughed when I read his profile, in spite of myself;

A flickr of his eye and a twist of his head,

Soon gave me to know I’d star in his next VoiceThread.

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his edit

and filled all the comments; then clicked “submit-it;”

and laying his fingers atop of the keyboard,

and hitting return, up the portal he rose;

He sprang to his trailfire, with his team, a smart mob

and away they all flew like the download of a vlog.

But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he blogged out of sight,

‘Happy mashups to all, and to all a good-night!

- with my sincere apologies to Clement Moore

(Revisions most welcome. Please post your suggestions under comments. Thank you.)