I already use Twitter for a mix of personal and professional activities but haven’t reflected yet on why I do so. I am somewhat lacking in tweets but use it instead to follow other people – a few librarians (one who sits on the desk behind me at work which says a lot about how open plan offices work), a few libraries, the local theatre, some cyclists on the Tour de France (don’t ask!) and several comedians. I’m not entirely sure what I should tweet about and I suspect this will need to be considered in terms of my online brand but at the moment I’m happy to follow the others. Many of the people I follow use it for commercial purposes - plugs for their TV shows etc which is ok as I follow them because I like them and I will probably watch their shows anyway. The Twitter accounts I like best for librarianship news are @Philbradley and @ijclark.
Google Reader is the most useful tool I’ve discovered this week. I’ve added all the librarianship blogs that I follow. I’m getting used to seeing everything in the one place although it does seem a bit cluttered. I’ve decided to restrict it to librarian blogs only so that I can use it purely for current awareness. My best blogs for current awareness are Phil Bradley’s weblog (to keep me up to date with the different products available), Sheila Webber’s Information Literacy Weblog (local to international news etc for info lit) and Dean Giustini’s The Search Principle Blog (I like his use of Slideshare and I’m looking forward to week 12: Presenting information which includes Slideshare).
After reading Helen’s 23 Things post I’ve started an iGoogle page. I’ve kept it quite simple and only added widgets/gadgets for Hotmail, GoogleReader, Twitter, calendar, YouTube, weather, To Do list, BBC news and just for fun some waddling penguins which frankly are the best thing on there at the moment. I kept this open on my work screen for the whole of yesterday and it’s quite nice to scan everything at once but will only be of use if I remember to log in each day (I fear I may have to write myself a note to remind me!). I've put iGoogle on a trial but it looks promising.
iGoogle seems very similar to Netvibes which I have messed around with in the past. Yesterday I saw a great example of how to use Netvibes for current awareness from Emma Aldrich at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust Libraries MTW NHS Trust Knowledge Services I’d like to do something like this for the students I support at the university but web 2.0 tools are looked at with some suspicion here. LibGuides and Wikidot look like other useful tools and maybe my workplace will explore these at some point.
Yes, do persevere! :)
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