In his post for thing 4 David Green proudly proclaims

Fact: RSS and Twitter are my top 2 favourite things on the Internet

And you know what? I whole heartedly agree with him. In fact I may just stop this post here because there’s little I can add to what he has already said. But that would be lazy, so here’s my take on the Internet’s top 2.

  by  williamedia 

Twitter
My name is Emma and I am a Twitter addict. And for the record I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. Since I started using Twitter properly, and by properly I mean actively engaging, I feel a connection to the profession that I wasn’t aware could ever be possible. My followers and followees keep me on my toes, they make me aware of current issues, share their experiences and most importantly keep me smiling through the grey days.

There was a lot of talk a while back about whether Twitter was an RSS killer. For me it’s definitely not. It acts as a wonderful addition to RSS as it broadens the range of articles and blog posts I am pointed to. What I increasingly found however was that when I was checking Twitter I rarely had the time to really follow up on the links I saw. I needed a solution to this and so have recently started using the wonderful Read It Later to well, um, store stuff to read later. With this addition Twitter has become for me a second RSS reader.

My top 5 follows for current awareness

• @angefitzpatrick
• @jimmy1712
• @joeyanne
• @librarybazaar
• @LibraryEmma

  by  Travelin’ Librarian 

RSS
I am a firm believer that RSS has changed the way the web works and that the world would be a poorer place without it. Through my RSS reader I am able to keep up to date with all of my favourite blogs and websites without having to remember or find the time to navigate to their sites regularly to check for updates. I find it increasingly hard to believe that we ever did things that way. Okay, it might have worked when we had 3-5 favourite sites, but there’s no way I could maintain that system with the 92 sites I currently subscribe to.

My top 5 subscriptions for current awareness

• Attempting Elegance
• Information Tyrannosaur
• Info-mational
• Laura’s Dark Archive
• Libreaction

• Thing 3: Create your own 23 things blog and make your first post.
• Thing 4: Register your 23 Things blog and explore others.

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.