CPD23 Thing 3: Branding myself

Part I – My brand
  
I let a couple of days pass since Thing 3 went up on the cpd23 blog and, in the meantime, I had a look at what other people were saying about their personal brand. The thing that struck me most was the exercise mentioned by Tina in Tina’s Library Related Stuff: define your brand in six words. Come on – I told myself - six words, it can’t be difficult! Well, I have been thinking about it for three days now, and haven’t come up with ANYTHING, so I will be using this post (and your patience) for a bit of self-brainstorming.

Cam23 Extra #1: Improving

Hello again Cambridge!

I will be with you from Wednesday onwards, but I'm publishing a quick post just to say that on Saturday I spent some time improving my blog with the excuse of the extra thing number 1.

And also Cam23 Thing 2: Blogs and social media

I have talked about my relationship with blogging in the CPD23 first post; and I have partially covered social media in Cam23 Thing 1 (see the paragraph about my scattered brain!). I’ll just add that I tend to use Facebook for personal reasons, and Twitter for professional reasons. I’m working my way around LinkedIn. I am a huge fan of Flickr, first because I love photography, and second because it allowed me to set up a beautiful image library for my department (password-protected too – I’d love to show it to you). Twitter was difficult at the beginning – it takes time to adapt to that kind of communication.

Cam23 Thing 1: iGoogle

Hello Cambridge! Here I am with my first post for Cam23.

In a bit of a hurry, I have created my first iGoogle page. Why on earth nobody told me about it before? ;-) I was franctically jumping between GoogleDocs, Reader, Gmail, Calendar, etc. etc., without knowing I could have them all in one place.

CPD23 Thing 2: More blogging

As promised, today at lunchtime I went blog-hunting to find other CPD23-ers and see what they had been up to for Thing 1. I based my search on the conversation on twitter (#cpd23) and visited almost all those who sent a proud tweep about their first post yesterday. I also took a quick look at the Participants list and the tags on Delicious, to pick some interesting titles. Like I do with books, I choose bloggers on the basis of catchy titles – well done to Conan The Librarian Strikes Back who had me looking at that blog even if there was no CPD23 post on there yet.

CPD23 Thing 1: Blogging

Finally, the day has arrived: here we are with some 23-things related posts. I will try to keep the CPD23 and Cam23 separated and blog on different days, ideally CPD23 on Monday and Tuesday, Cam23 in the rest of the week. Sounds feasible, doesn’t it? ;-)

So, why am I taking part in the course? Well, being a member of the organising team, I suppose I couldn’t keep my place behind the scenes, and just watch all you people having fun with our programme. Besides, to overcome a sense of being stuck that was starting to haunt me, I have been thinking a lot about my career in the past few months, so this seems to be the perfect chance to gather my thoughts together and transform them in some form of action.

CPD23: will you?

Back in January, I had a nice talk to myself and decided to stick to the following rule for the first half of 2011: don't turn myself down and don’t prevent me from doing things. This is mainly why I now find myself running like a hamster in a wheel to keep everthing going...but feeling more alive than ever. When I was asked to be part of the CPD23 organising team, I said "yes" without even knowing what a 23 Things programme was.