Thing 4 Current Awareness

I was really tempted to put in a picture of currants for this one, but have held back! For Thing 4, I was surprised to be asked to investigate a site/tool I'd never even heard of: Pushnote.

Pushnote
After having a read some other posts by 23Things participants (e.g. Girl in the Moon), I've decided not to try.  It might seem a bit lazy but the chances of me wanting to use it after I've the programme is over are small so I'm going to concentrate on other things.  I already use Delicious to tag sites and I find that quite helpful for keeping track of sites for my own use.  I'm not really bothered about sharing sites with other people.  If there's something that's struck me enough that I want to share it, normally it's something that I think will be of interest to a particular person and so I'll email it to them. It's always a nice excuse to get in touch with someone and show you're thinking of them.  As you can guess from that last comment, I mainly send links to friends and family!

Flickr: Tracy Holland

Twitter
Last year in the Oxford 23 Things we looked at Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  I signed up for Twitter to try it out but concluded it was for 'old people' who could afford internet enabled phones.  Since then I've realised I'm getting old because quite a few of my friends Tweet.  Unfortunately, I'm still a pay-as-you-go gal so my attempts at Twitter use are sporadic.  When I was doing the taught part of my library course and working two days a week I would check Twitter in the mornings before going to class and on my studying at home days but now I'm back working 4 or 5 days a week I've not been bothering. Same conclusion as last year (backed up by Laura's experience).

RSS feeds
Now I like these.  I use Google Reader to track my favourite blogs and find it really clear and easy to use.  If I didn't use it, I'd probably not bother to check each blog so it's a boon. Spotty dog! (Thanks to my friend from Dingwall for teaching me that phrase)  I've signed up for the cpd23things participant feed so I'm looking forward to using that to widen the pool of participants posts that I read for the next Things.

Not Very Current Awareness
Writing this post, I've realised that I don't really use these tools for very up-to-the-minute info.  Perhaps this is something that I can reflect on for Thing 5 - how can I efficiently and effectively improve my current awareness?

Personal Branding - ouch! Things 2 and 3

Pic from peoplequiz.com

Oh dearie me! After all my good intentions I've fallen woefully behind. I'm might take a bit of a short cut and start rolling multiple things into a single blog post.

Helpfully, by doing Thing 2 - looking at other people's blogs and leaving posts, I was also finding out about Thing 3 - personal branding.  It was interesting to see the different approaches that people take and their opinions on their own brands.  Two lovely people left me comments below and I had a wee nosey at their profiles and a few others.  I used the Delicious page of cpd23things participants to browse by category.  It was comforting to read that lots of other people preferred to be lurkers than authors.

Personal branding sounds painful.  It seems that this branding malarky is rather time consuming, but I can see that when you put the effort in it can be very effective.  There are some people's blogs/online presences that I particularly like e.g. Joeyanne Libraryanne (her 23things blog is separate).

My own branding's not particularly strong.  I've jazzed up this blog to make it look a bit more modern and added a picture that matches the one on my twitter and linked in accounts.  If I search for my name on Google I don't really appear unless you add 'SSL' or library or Oxford, instead you get some wifey off the Brady Bunch (see picture).  But on the upside, if you do find me, there's nothing up there that I wouldn't want people to see.

Alicessl is probably not the wisest name choice.  I adopted it when I was working as a trainee at the Social Science Library. Conveniently, I'm working there again now so it still fits.  Perhaps I shall have to pretend it's an abbreviation for something else e.g. supersleuth librarian or I could use it to tailor my career path and try to become a Social Sciences subject consultant!  On the other hand, one of my fellow librarians in training goes by the moniker of Theatregrad and I think it works well because it share a memorable fact about her.

As I look at other people's blog for the subsequent 'Things', I'll be particularly aware of their branding. Hopefully it will give me some inspiration!

23 more things

Well, it's been a while! I'm reviving my blog to do the 23 Things for Professional Development. I created it last year for Oxford University Library Service's 23 Things programme.  It looks like the things we covered last year will be relevant to the 23 new things in this new CPD version, so I thought it might be handy to continue it rather than start a new one.

I'm really looking forward to the 23 things and learning about how web2.0 can be applied to cpd and hearing about other people's experiences with it.

The end is nigh!

After a bit of a roundabout route and a last minute dash I've made it to the 23rd thing!  I'm really glad I tried out all the things, even if it would not use all of them again.  I'm not planning to use LinkedIn in the near future or delicious.  It is good to know they are there and how they work, maybe they will be useful one day.  I'm keeping my iGoogle page and will try to build up my RSS feeds - all the 23 things feeds will disappear so I can add some more library blogs.

It has been useful to find out more about how other libraries use web 2.0 and has made me think about how tools can be used in a library setting.  It was also nice to do the activities as a good and has been a good talking point in the office.  I am grateful for the assistance provided by my colleagues when I got stuck!  Hopefully this knowledge will be useful when I go to study at UWE in the autumn.

Widgets

Rather than add a delicious widget, I have played around with my existing widgets and added a word cloud.  I tried out delicious from home and ended up with a long list of hairdressers, which isn't very useful for this site! I have also got rid of my flickr stream because my photos were not very exciting.  I might add it again if I create an album of photos about my thesis project.

I have had a go with Wordle to make this cloud.  It is not a tag cloud, I have copied and pasted the text from my blogs into the site.  This came up with more interesting results than the option to make a cloud based on the URL of my blog.  Phil Bradley suggests using Tagxedo and I am going to try that from home because it requires a Microsoft Silverlight and I don't want to download things like that to a work PC.

I also tried to personalise my template using Blogger in draft but the page would not open properly - I wondered if this was because the work PCs use an old form of IE?

Wikis

To confuse people further, I am doing another entry out of sync - this time about wikis.  I did not like the format of the OULS wetpaint wiki because I found the animated adverts distracting - I suppose that they allow users to have sites for free, but it's a shame that they are not static.  Also it was a shame that the layout of the site was not more attractive or personal like the format of our blogs. 

I did not contribute to the wet paint wiki but I did add a sentence to the wikipedia entry for the SSL to note our name change.  To edit the blog I had to type in a window with html-type bits which was a bit daunting.  I really like using wikipedia to find out bits and bobs, but I always try to remember that it is not an authoritative source and that I cannot rely on it to be correct or up to date.  As a collaborative tool, the most interesting wiki I have found is the Library Routes Project about library careers. I am glad I tried wikis because I think they might pop up again in future jobs.

Clouds and slow documents

Quite a few other 23 things bloggers have complained about the slowness of ThinkFree Office, especially in comparison to Google Docs.  Another point that I found to add was that I found Google Docs easier to navigate around.  I liked the templates that were available and would consider using them for future projects - eg planners and photo albums.  I tried uploading a few different types of document and found that my Powerpoints even when converted were good but that a Word doc with pictures, arrows and text boxes lost the arrows and text boxes.  When I kept the Word document in its original format it was displayed correctly but I found the text more difficult to read.

I think Google Docs is a good idea, especially for people who have to move about and still access documents but they would need to be confident that they had access to the internet. I know that it is possible to work offline with some sites, but you would need to connect to save changes eventually.  Also more complicated formats don't seem to work when uploaded so I'm not sure what would happen in the other direction if you wanted to save a document created in Google Docs back to Microsoft Office.  Perhaps it would be useful as an emergency back up storage site.  Also I do worry about these things just floating about in the ether, so won't put up those top secret bank heist plans!