Sunday, March 4, 2012

Thing 2 - being up with the latest

Tweeted my first tweet! Should have done it at the time at VALA. I have never been convinced by the whole Twitter thing although I certainly think it is a great communciation tool between a large number of people attending the same conference.
Sort of like passing notes in school - but for educational purposes. There is an argument that it actually fractures the experience at a conference - can you be really paying full attention if you are focussing on your response? On the other other hand, someone else's tweet might enrich your understanding.
For me, I think I will be using Twitter to keep abreast of the latest news on a particular topic, not tweeting updates on my fascinating thoughts and life.
I much prefer using a RSS reader to stay in touch with the latest in libraries (amongs other interestseg Melbourne food blogs). I like being able to take in at a glance a range of info. I originally set up a Bloglines account during the Learning 23 Things course and never stopped using it. Sadly, Bloglines shut down at the end of 2010 and I had to migrate to Google Reader which I didn't like as much.
However, I decided to explore what happened to Bloglines and discovered that it had resurfaced, but not in quite the same format. I spent a few too many hours exploring the full capabilities of both readers and discovered that neither has the useful option of being able to share lists of feeds. I did make the effort to categorise the blogs though into Food, Libraries, Books and Moonee Valley blogs. I subscribed to all 22 of our blogs made much easier by going to Google Reader, Settings/Goodies and getting the Subscribe bookmark.
I have also downloaded Feeder apps for my phone and iPad. I cna read your posts wherever I am!
I tried Pushnote but was not engaged by it. I think I will still use Delicious (see tag cloud on the left) to bookmark web pages.

1 comment:

Leslie said...

I agree. Twitter will never be for me personally but I do hope it will make a difference to our community professionally. And with regards RSS readers, Sharing lists would be very useful indeed!