Thing 4: Current Awareness

I have enjoyed this Thing as we’ve all been able to take so much from each other, such is the egalitarian nature of Twitter.  By being on it and using it nearly every day I’ve got to learn loads.  Even by simply lurking I have picked up rules of etiquette, tips and brilliant advice. (Maybe lurking is bad etiquette?!)  For the most part though, I adopted the Learn By Doing approach and just got on with it.  You’ll see my nonsense on Twitter most days now and it helped when I got my Smart phone a few months ago too.  However, Thing 4 has really helped me think about how I should be using it “properly”.

Last week, I took a look at this excellent blog post by @medievaljenga.  It holds some solid tips and advice and further tools to use to make the most of Twitter.  Will definitely be checking out Pocket.  Snap Bird was also a revelation to me as well, thanks to @walkyouhome.

At first, like many others who have already written about this Thing, it all seemed overwhelming and I limited the number of people I followed.  However, the more I explored the more interesting and funny and informative people I found so I wanted to follow to see what they had to say.  I have spent today so far sorting out many of these in to lists as suggested by Jen in her aforementioned excellent blog post.  I have to say though that Tweet Deck has yet to reveal itself to me properly, as the app I am using. That is, I am not sure how to use it the most efficiently to help myself.  I’m still experimenting as I didn’t really have much trouble on my own timeline catching things I was interested in or wanted to contribute to.  I will persevere though, to use Twitter in such a way as to exploit its many benefits.  

(The next thing I must learn: how to “mute” certain things, for example I am not interested in every single conference that people are going to, and sometimes up to ten people are live-tweeting such events and it is too much!  Even though I don’t read anywhere near every tweet on my timeline, it would be good to have some control.)

I’m keen to stick it out with Twitter as the more I use it the more I get out of it.  There are some brilliant people out there.  Good enough to get their tweets embroidered on samplers? I expect so. Although, maybe iced on a cake might be more fitting for these LIS gurus.

RSS feeds - have been using Google Reader intermittently for a couple of years.  I usually forget all about it to be honest despite my life being basically run by Google these days.  Now though I’ve subscribed to some really great blogs and being involved in cpd 23 things is making me want to keep up so for this it’s been awesome.  I love the RSS feed for all participants in the programme, really useful!  I really enjoyed @girlinthe’s post about how it all comes together - an interesting peer in the back door.

Storify looks spiffy. I love how it looks and it has enhanced many a presentation or news article.  I haven’t played with it myself, although have made baby steps and set up an account. I’ll come back to it when I have an actual cause to use it.