Thing 4 – Current awareness: Twitter, RSS and Pushnote

Twitter
This week I opened my first Twitter account [@SquirrelLib] with a little help from my colleague Kristine [@KrisWJ] as she has kept to the CPD23 time table and did hers weeks ago. Well it’s all very exciting but I also find it somewhat overwhelming and I’m only following 15 people! That said, the immediacy of Twitter is amazing - in fact I signed up to follow my own institution and never realised there was so much going on J Oh yes, and I signed up to follow Stephen Fry… I couldn’t help myself. On a more practical level I’m following a nice diverse selection including the National Library of Wales, Glamorgan Archives, British Museum, CILIP, LISPN, Metropolitan Museum of Art, BBC News and of course CPD23 [with helpful and interesting tweets from Katie Birkwood [@Girlinthe] and Lauren Smith [@Walkyouhome] to name but a few]. It’s early days yet but I will endeavour to acquaint myself with this new phenomenon; my first task is to build my tweets and followers into double figures.

RSS Feeds

Now, this is something I’ve really taken to. It’s such a practical tool – a one stop shop [via Google Reader] for all the news from your favourite websites and blogs in a few seconds and just couple of clicks! As suggested I subscribed to the handy bundle of all the CPD23 blogs [courtesy of Shannon Robalino] and there they all were with updates bouncing back and fourth all over the place! So much easier than trawling through them via the website and when you have access to all the blogs you realise that there are so many more that you wish to explore.  However, I wonder if this is one of those things that I get really excited about then hardly ever use - only time will tell.

Pushnote
I've signed up to Pushnote but quite frankly I'm not very impressed with it [although Stephen Fry seems to love it] so, since I'm seriously behind schedule I'm going to leave it for now and plough on to Thing 5 ... onwards and upwards!