I’m back, and this time I’m starting with Cam23, because this is were I’m running terribly late. So while you are all having fun with screencasting, I’m going to write my observations on RSS feeds and Twitter. The latter being also the theme of cpd23 this week, it’s all going to be very confused in these posts. I hope you’ll bear with me!
RSS feeds
I wasn’t using them much until some months ago, when I realised that in order to follow everything I was interested in, I had to find a convenient way. I read this article and set GoogleReader up. It worked really well until the blog list started to grow and grow. Now that I end up with at least 15 new posts a day, I’m struggling. I had also put the Reader feed on my iGoogle page, which was giving me a slightly nagging feeling every time I saw a new post popping up. I have now removed it from there and decided to open GReader only when I know I have the time to read the posts there – and click on each in order to read them in their appropriate visual context (I don’t like the fact that GReader shows just the text without the formatting. Expecially after all those discussions about online branding and visual identity we had for cdp23 week 3). We’ll see how it works. In the meantime, I have to give Netvibes a try.
I signed up about three months ago. I was talking to Niamh and desperately trying to sound aware of events and news in the library world; when she said, for the third time in ten minutes, “I know, I’ve seen it on Twitter”, I decided I was sounding like a person boasting about how quick her bike is to somebody driving a car. Time to leave the bike and buy the car.
A brief summary of Twitter ups, off the top of my head:
- the amount of useful information you gather there is unbelievable.
- it gives you the chance to contact people you don’t know in an informal but still professional way: it is the perfect place to take a “profersonal” approach to relationships, expecially if compared to Facebook, which I see mainly as a personal media, or LinkedIn, which goes in the opposite direction.
- whenever I advertise a new post on my blog on Twitter, the stats go up considerably.
- it is a great way to build personal relationships with people you only meet for work-related reasons. For example, when I was brave enough to say I was going to the Take That concert in Wembley, I discovered that Helen, Lisa and Jenni were all fans. You see, librarians don’t talk just about obscure classification systems. ;-)
And a brief summary of Twitter downs, from the same place:
- I follow 39 people at the moment but I don’t think I can do more than 30 actually. I really struggle to keep up. If I don’t look at it for a whole hour, when I come back I have to spend ten minutes reading all the new tweets.
- It is very distracting. And I’m a curious person, which probably makes me the ideal Twitter user, but not in my own views – I really can’t keep checking it every five minutes.
Overall, I think Twitter is a great tool. I keep saying that technology is what you make of it, and this is very true in the Twitter case. After trying it for personal reasons, I have opened an account for the Careers Service Library (@camcareerslib). It’s still at early stages, but I hope we will get many followers when Michaelmas Term starts. It’s been the first breach into social media for our library and I really hope it will help us to gain a more relaxed approach to these tools (after the Twitter leap, my boss has also mentioned the possibility of having a Facebook page: watch this space!). I have not been tweeting very regularly on there, but I found these great guidelines by Laura Waldoch a couple of days ago which give some interesting tips, expecially regarding timing. Guess where I found the link? Yes, you’ve got it... ;-)
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