Things 4 & 3: Twitter, and RSS Feeds

Coming rather late in the week to Things 3 and 4, I have decided to blog about them in one post. And as I know considerably more of Twitter than I do of RSS feeds, I have decided to write about them in the wrong order. I do hope that I'm not breaking any rules...

So, Thing 4: Twitter. I have had a personal Twitter account since October 2009 - I started it on my birthday, no less - and I have been using it fairly enthusiastically since. Aidan would almost certainly concur with the comment made by the author of the Thing 4 post that Twitter is his favourite Thing. I wouldn't go that far, but I do find it fun, somewhat addictive, and occasionally very useful. I tweet mainly to publicise events I'm involved with, post quirky pieces of news, and respond one-to-one (or one-to-many, depending on how many followers we have in common) to others' tweets.

I have sometimes felt slightly jealous of Aidan, who has so clearly found a community of interested and interesting librarians in his corner of the Twitterverse. (I am following, and being followed by, a few of them myself, and I hope to add some more during this course.) My rather more eclectic professional life makes that difficult to replicate, however. I am at least a semi-detached member of three professional communities: science journalists, teachers in higher education, and molecular biologists / biotechnologists. It has been interesting to see that while the journalists and the educationalists frequent Twitter, the biotech people congregate in Linked In. I may speculate more about possible reasons for this when we come to Thing 15...

When I was still a very raw Twitter newbie, less than three months into my Twitter account, I had the temerity to write about it in a regular column in The Biochemist, the trade magazine of the UK's Biochemical Society (and so more or less analogous to Library & Information Update). This piece, entitled Tweeting Biochemistry and now rather out of date (with references to ministers in the previous government), urges biochemists to try it out, explains how the Society encourages delegates to its conferences to publicise them on Twitter, and gives a few hints and tips culled from articles I'd found useful. Very much later, I came across a blog post from Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist at Oxford: A gentle guide to Twitter for the apprehensive academic. It's the piece I wish I could have written myself.

You can find me on Twitter as @Clare_Sansom. And I intend, when I figure out how, to add my latest tweets to a sidebar on this blog. Does anyone have instructions for this to hand?

And now, Thing 3: RSS Feeds. I have to confess that I have found it difficult to see much use for these, and until this week I'd not installed any on the iGoogle page that I've been using intermittently as my home page for several years. I think my main reluctance has been the risk of information overload. With my portfolio career, and with my academic discipline being such a fast-moving one, I could literally spend all day reading relevant blogs, and I have had an enormous problem deciding which feeds to subscribe to. For now, I have come to this exercise as librarian manque. Besides the cam23 blog, and (of course) Aidan's, I am now following some in the information arena that seem to be of wider interest. So far, I particularly recommend the excellent Phil Bradley's weblog, and, for following the all-important campaign to save the public library (to think that this should even be necessary!), Voices for the Library.

Maybe one day I will get the bit between my teeth and add 150 molecular biology blogs and newsfeeds. But will I ever read them if I do?

First Post...

Welcome to my blog.

And three questions for my first post. Firstly the two posed by Thing 2. What do I hope to get out of 23 Things Cambridge version 2.0 - and why am I doing it at all, as I'm not even a librarian? And secondly, what is my experience of Web 2.0 so far? But also thirdly - why Ursula Small?

I owe my interest in this course to my husband, Aidan Baker, Haddon Librarian and poet, who blogs at Blurtmetry. Aidan has said often enough that the original Cam23 was the best thing that his 2010 had to offer, and that has been enough to intrigue me.

I have been using a handful of Web 2.0 tools since possibly before the term was invented, but in a rather amateur fashion: some, such as RSS feeds, I've simply ignored (giving the poor excuse of lack of time) and others, such as Linked In and Aidan's favourite, Twitter, I feel I don't get as much out of as I could. I will post my experience of the various "things" so far in my next post. I hope that I will be allowed to dip in and out of 2011's "extra things" as my very mixed levels of prior experience suggest.

But my main reason for tackling this now is that it gives me an excuse to get up a personal blog, and learn about blogging while doing so. From time to time, the Association of British Science Writers (of which I am an associate member) discusses the thorny issue of whether a science writer needs to have a blog. "Suck it and see" has been the usual answer. Will I keep blogging after Cam23 2.0 is done and dusted? Time will tell.

And why Ursula Small? Since long before we got engaged, Aidan's affectionate nickname for me has been "Little Bear". I first thought of Ursula Small as a pseudonym that I could use if I ever took to writing fiction. But I don't realistically think that I ever will, and when, earlier this year, I mentioned it to a friend who does write fiction, she said it was too good to forget...

Oh, and while on the subject of pseudonyms, I answer to "Clare Baker" just as readily, but not when I'm working.