Well this Thing has caused me no end of difficulties. I've moved jobs at work and although I work for the same authority, I now have less access to a PC and completely different demands on my time. Much of my "research" and looking around now has to take place at home.
Twitter: I've had an account on Twitter for some time, but it took Thing 4 to encourage me to make my first tweet. Funnily enough, that was it, nothing since! I can sort of see the use for Twitter in certain information environments, but for a public authority librarian unless you have access to it all the time to see responses to tweets, it really does not work. I think there is quite a difference between what everyone has access to in their work environment, but from my experience, public authority PCs are considerably more locked down than a university PC. One blog post from another participant (now comes the problem, I can't remember who and didn't follow them!) thoughts echoed my opinions aobve. Twitter is something which you need to be constantly plugged into and it just isn't possible in some work environments.
RSS feeds: I've been using Google Reader for some time, so this is not a new thing for me. One of the original posts I ever subscribed too was Phil Bradley's blog I mainly subscribe to sewing blogs for ideas with sewing, but I'm now beginning to feel the need to subscribe to other "library" or professional feeds to get the juices going. I might even be enthused to write more on this blog apart from about the Things. What I'm finding now is that I have to make sure I spend at least an hour each day to check Google Reader, otherwise I have so many posts, it's impossible to keep on top of. Has anyone else found a way to keep on top of these? I have to say, it's almost become second nature to log into email, and then log into Google Reader. It's a nightmare if I've been away for a while!!
Pushnote: I've not even looked at this. I certainly can't use it at work and it sort of seems to be another version of Delicious in some ways. Useful websites can be saved in "public" folders in Delicious. We're considering using Delicious on our public PCs to make useful websites available to the public.
This has been a slightly negative post this time, but I think already the differences between embracing web 2.0 technology in different sectors is beginning to show, and we're only three weeks into the 23 things...
I agree about Twitter, before working in a university it was very difficult to keep up with. Google Reader - I don't even try to read all of the posts on it! I check it at breaks and after work but tend to skim the headlines for interesting topics and then mark the rest as read. Sometimes the headlines give you enough current awareness in themselves, and you know the post exists to check back on it if you need to! If people use titles that don't reflect the content I'm likely to miss relevant things, but the same can be said for journal articles (less of those artsy titles please and more of the content!) I do have some particular feeds that I'm more likely to read regardless of the title they've used for their posts...
ReplyDeleteHi Niamh, I'm quite in agreement about the less arty titles and more of the content. I guess they use them to make you read further, thus taking up more of our time!
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