Things 3 & 4 – Blogs

I have been blogging for a long time. I think I started my first blog in 2000 on the now obsolete site diary-x. For the first few years I flitted around different platforms with different usernames until I settled down with Digitalist and Wordpress in January 2009.

For me the key thing about having a blog is knowing what you’re going to write about. I struggled for a long time trying to write about both my social and professional interests on the same blog. I also found that none of my readers were entirely happy – my friends didn’t care about libraries and my colleagues didn’t want to hear about my personal life. Now that I have separated these two I find that blogging is so much easier; it’s easier to identify topics to write about and easier to reach the appropriate audience.

Speaking of reaching audiences, in reading the blogs of fellow 23 things participants I have noticed a lot of speculation about who is going to be reading them. In this case the main reason for writing a blog is to keep a record of your progress throughout the programme. The main audience is likely to be other participants who are keen to read about what others have been doing each week and perhaps to learn a little bit more from the experiences of other participants.

Things 1 & 2 – iGoogle

It’s week 3 of the 23 things programme and things are going swimmingly. We’ve got 112 participants at the last count which I think is amazing – that’s about 1/5 of the total workforce apparently. It’s not only the number of participants that is making the programme work, there’s also a buzz on the blogs of the participants and there really seems to be a community forming.

Well enough of that, as I said before it’s week 3 and I’m behind already, so on to some talk about the things. Week 1 eased us in gently with the creation of a Google account and setting up of an iGoogle start page. I have had a Google account for some time now and already use Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs and iGoogle.

Below is a screenshot of my iGoogle page. I haven’t updated it in a while and I use it rarely. I find that the occasions that I do use it are when I’m using a different computer to usual. I don’t have much stuff on it but you can see from the image that I’ve grouped the content on to three tabs – News, Twitter and Work.

Library Day in the Life – Thursday 28 & Friday 29 January 2010

Liverpool Hilton
Originally uploaded by ekcragg

Unfortunately I failed in my attempts to take a photo a day this week for the Library Day in the Life project. In fact, Thursday is the first day since New Year’s Day that I haven’t taken a photo.

Thursday was just one of those days. Although it is very nice to be out of the office for a day every now and again I find that it often makes the day before a running around like a headless chicken day. To make things doubly hard I spent the afternoon shift (13.00 – 17.00) on the busy library desk. It’s the second week of term and there are a lot of people in the library every afternoon chasing down the books they need to write their assignments. By the end of the day I was relishing the opportunity to change gear and wind down to the weekend with a trip to Liverpool for a Business Librarians Association (BLA) committee meeting.

To get to Liverpool in time for a 12 o’clock meeting I had to get up a little earlier than usual to catch a train at 08.07. On the first leg of the journey (Oxford to Birmingham) I caught up on the latest issue of CILIP Update. At Birmingham I met two fellow committee members and we continued on together from there.

The main purpose of this meeting was to visit the hotel where our annual conference is going to take place in July. This is the newly opened Liverpool Hilton (image above). Although the hotel has been open since November their official launch party happened the night before our meeting. As you might expect some people were a little worse for wear having partied until 06.00.

Despite a packed agenda we finished the meeting a little earlier than expected so I had about an hour before my train to have a wander along the waterfront. The journey home seemed to take forever and the trains were packed. When I finally got home around 21.00 there were two thing on my mind – pizza and beer!