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 This piece, entitled Tweeting Biochemistry and now rather out of date (with references to ministers in the previous government), urges biochemists to try it out, explains how the Society encourages delegates to its conferences to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?
Adding tweets - one way might be to click on design on the top sidebar then add gadget and search for one of the twitter items that suits.
ReplyDeleteSuzan http://wildventure.blogspot.com
It's great to read the perspective of a non-librarian Clare - and I do see how you are apprehensive about taking on too many RSS feeds. I've run training sessions on RSS feeds (selling it as 'getting information to come to you') and general one or two people of the group take on the idea enthusisatically and the rest decide it's not for them, either because it's too Techie or like you, are nervous of information overload. If you *need* to monitor lots of information it is immensely useful. If you *want* to do so the temptation to go overboard initially is very strong, and if you don't spend time culling unwanted feeds at a later stage the benefits are lost.
ReplyDeleteRegarding Twitter sidebars in Blogger - sign in and select the Design tab. Select 'add a gadget' on the right hand side (in your case) and 'more'. I'm still learning about this but there is more than one Twitter gadget so you don't have to select the first one on your list.
I also struggle with the rss feeds and not totally happy with any of the ways I check them out! I am going to try them on netvibes - I used that for cam23 last year and it worked well so now I just need to create a new netvibes feed and add the useful stuff.
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