What is the difference between currants, raisins and sultanas? (Thing 4 – CPD23)

Or Thing 4: Staying current

Twitter
I’ve had a twitter account for a while, since September 2008 apparently, wow longer than I thought. As I wrote previously, my tweets have moved from purely professional to a mixture of professional and personal. I tend to look at twitter at least a couple of times a day, even on the weekend, though I have been known to take time out occasionally. In fact, I like twitter so much I now have 3 accounts! As well as my personal account @_moo_, I set up an account for the site library I work in and set one up for the London LibTeachMeet I helped organise in June. To help with the maintenance of these I use Hootsuite to manage all of the accounts (and keep track of my blog), which is great as I can see my stream, sent tweets, favourite tweets, mentions, and any searches I set up all in one place and for all three accounts.

Admittedly there are times when the sheer amount of information coming out of twitter is too much, but then I can switch it off, walk away and come back when I am ready to take it all in again. Lots of people use lists and this is really something I should look into but I don’t know if it is entirely necessary with the way I have set up Hootsuite and so far I am coping with the influx. Although ask me this question in September/October and you may get a different answer.

But why do I like Twitter so much, what would it take to convince a non twitter person that it can be really is useful and fun. This is actually a hard question as there are plenty of negatives about Twitter like the amount of information and the inanity of the tweets. I would say that new users get the worst of Twitter.  When you first start out it seems impossible to follow conversations, it is hard to know who to follow and do you, yourself, have anything to say. Give twitter some time to grow on you, during that time a network or group of people to follow and talk to grows. This group can change over time as well as you change your mind and stop following some people and also find new people to follow.

3 reasons I use twitter are:-

Twitter is my way of staying up to date, from world news to cutting edge science as well as keeping up with my librarianship. I know far more about the work of CILIP from twitter than I ever found out from training or events.

It provides a network of librarians making a much wider pool of experience and information than I had access to before, sometimes that network extends beyond the field of librarianship as well which is great. It is also a great support network, got a particularly thorny issue, you can always ask twitter and be sure of a range of solutions, some of which you may not have thought of.

If you are stuck at your desk and missing a coffee break, twitter is there to be your virtual coffee break and there is always someone around to go to coffee with.

RSS Feeds

I’ve had an RSS feedreader for a long time. My feedreader of choice was bloglines and I still miss it. I loved the functionality of bloglines which google reader still doesn’t quite give me although we are learning to like each other more. I have feeds from libraires, librarians and from crafty sites too. Ignoring the CPD23 feeds I have about 57 feeds coming in at the moment. I am gradually looking at the CPD23 blogs and adding those blogs that I find interesting into my librarian folder, a momentous task and one I am not sure I will finish. I like using a feed reader because the information is there when I am ready to read it, I don’t have to go looking for it and it doesn’t clog up my inbox.

Pushnote

I hold my hands up and admit that I haven’t tried this. Having to download it means no access at work. I also wanted to find out more about it before downloading it but information was scarce on the website. That and taking into account the views of some of the CPD23 participants that I follow on twitter meant that it was a no from me. I think this is one tool I am not going to sign up for and then promptly lose account details as I will never use it, perhaps I will be missing out but I don’t think so.

And as for the great question: What is the difference between currants, raisins and sultanas? I’ll refer you to @orangeaurochs blog for the answer.