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

I mentioned in my reading round-up for July that a lot of the article I have read over the past month have been about Google+. There are links to the best and most useful articles at the bottom of this post.

What I want to share with you here is my first reaction to Google+ and my experience one month in. And that can be described in one word…

Meh!

I just don’t get it, or perhaps more accurately I just don’t need it. I got an invite quite early on and set about creating some circles. What I found was that I was just replicating my networks from Twitter and Facebook. But what’s the point in that?

  by  ekcragg 

Facebook works perfectly well for me as a way to communicate online with my friends and family. Twitter works perfectly well for me as a way of sharing information and getting involved with my professional network.

  by  ekcragg 

Yes, I see that the theory behind Google+ is to bring both of those networks into one place to make it easier to share and communicate with selected groups. But at the moment it’s just not working for me, and why is that the case? I don’t want to have to specify for every single post I make who that content gets shared with. It’s as simple as that.

Julia Turner summed my feelings up perfectly in the Google+ segment on a recent edition of the Slate Culture Gabfest (which I would thoroughly recommend you listen to, it starts at around 17min):

“you can’t compartmentalise your public self from your private self with Google+”

If there is to be one social network to rule them all then that compartmentalisation needs to be doable and easy.

Further reading

• Could Google Ruin Your Online Personal Brand – PC Sweeney
• 30 Google+ tips to enhance your Google+ experience – webtrickz
• Several tips to help you get started with Google+ – Mark O’Neill
• Google+ tips and tricks – Janet Fouts
• Google+: And you thought Facebook is a privacy nightmare – ConceivablyTech
• So what is Google+ all about then? – Phil Bradley

Recently I read a blog post by Brian Herzog, the Swiss Army Librarian, about Being personal and professional on Twitter. It got me thinking about how I often blur the lines on Twitter and whether I should try to keep it more professional.

I think Brian is right, it’s easy to remain professional on the library accounts. Whether you’re tweeting under the library’s name, replying to a comment on the library Facebook page or posting on a library blog, it’s business. I really liked how he defined his aim when updating library social media accounts:

My goal is to be personable, not personal.

I would say my goal with these accounts is the same. To convey information from the library to our users whilst applying a human touch.

by  practicalowl

For my personal Twitter account however I apply different rules. Although it is essentially a professional account, created to allow me to engage with my peers in the information profession, it is also a personal account. It is mine, it bears my name and has no connection to my job, or my library. I therefore also express my personality and my personal interests through it.

Unlike Brian, I don’t think I need separate Twitter accounts, one for professional stuff and one for personal stuff. The main reason for this is because I feel that being a librarian and having in an interest in information and education is too large a part of me. Having two Twitter accounts would be like splitting my personality.

Today I read an article by Martin Weller and George Siemens, Higher Education and the Promises and Perils of Social Networks, which confirmed my thinking about the blurring of boundaries on Twitter:

Some users of Twitter try to have multiple accounts for instance, to differentiate personal and professional comments, but it is precisely the personal element in SNSs that gives them value and interest.

And so I shall continue to intersperse my professional networking on Twitter with stuff about quiffs, cats, sport and LGBT issues.

Last week Jess and I ran a session called ‘Making the web work for you’ as part of a seminar series for researchers. The aim of the session was to introduce researchers to some online tools for finding and managing information. We covered the following:

• RSS feeds
• start pages
• search alerts
• table of contents alerts
• blogs
• Twitter
• social bookmarking

The session had fairly poor attendance with only 3 of the 6 who had booked actually turning up. If we run it again we need to think more about how we market it to ensure researchers see the relevance of these tools to their work. The small number did however aid the second half of the session in which we had a group discussion about the nature of finding and managing information.

  by  Travelin’ Librarian 

We gave the group two prompts to get the discussion started:

1. How do you currently find information about your topic?
2. How might you use some of the tools we have introduced today to get this information in future?

In answer to the first question the most common approach was to visit the websites of a few trusted sources or to read their print publications. This however seemed to be a fairly ad hoc process which they followed when time allowed. When asked how they kept up with and collaborated with their peers each said they were members of professional networks but their interaction with these was largely through organised events and newsletters.

Two of the attendees had no previous experience using any of the tools we had introduced. The second question brought out a lot of their fears about this new technology. Their main reservation was that RSS feeds would lead to information overload. We tried to reassure them that they are still in control – it’s up to them which sites they subscribe to and how often they read them. It’s about routine and a realisation that there’s no obligation to read every update in full.

Another concern that kept coming up was about relevance and authority. For example there’s still a perception that the only people on Twitter are celebrities and people talking about what they had for lunch. What we aimed to show them through examples was that the same trusted sources whose websites they visited and other researchers within their fields were also providing information through blogs, Twitter, Delicious and many other social media sites.

By the end of the session the two attendees who had no prior experience both said they would start by creating iGoogle pages and setting up alerts for the regular searches they run on e-journals databases. One was keen to explore Delicious and the other I think I’d almost convinced to try out Twitter.

• Thing 15: Sign up for Twitter and find people to follow
• Thing 16: Start engaging with your network using @replies and retweets

Using this helpful tool I have just discovered that I joined Twitter on 22nd October 2008. I didn’t get it first time though and let my account go dormant for a while until picking up again and posting my first tweet on 25th February 2009. After that I was hooked and started singing Twitter’s praises far and wide. I wrote two introductory posts on it on this blog (Twitter – the basics and Twitter – the next level) and presented a session at the 2009 British Business Schools Librarians Group (now the Business Librarians Association) conference.

Catherine, a fellow 23 Thing participant tweeted a question to the group today. She asked

“Can anyone in the Ox23 group summarise what are the main advantages of Twitter?”

And here is my response in just short of 140 characters:

Since joining Twitter I have connected with a vast network of librarians across the world. By engaging with this network on Twitter I have asked questions, had questions answered, shared useful links, discovered new tools and been part of far-reaching discussions that have sprung out of a single speculative tweet. Not only that but through publishing the links of my blog posts to Twitter via Twitterfeed the traffic to my blog has increased dramatically. This I would say is the main argument for libraries having a presence on Twitter. It’s all about promotion – using channels like Twitter you can extend the audience for your library’s announcements and provide new ways for your users to gather information about and interact with the library and its staff.

In a post I wrote after the session at the BBSLG conference I gave my top tips for people getting started on Twitter and here they are again…

1. Upload a picture – show us you’re human. It doesn’t have to be a photo of you, although it is nice, but just something that shows a bit of your personality.
2. Write a bio – for the same reason as before really. Prospective followers will want to learn a bit about you first.
3. Follow, follow, follow – to get the most out of Twitter right from the word go you need to find people to follow and lots of them. As I mentioned in my talk find a few at first and then use their follower lists to find more like minded people.
4. Share – this not only goes for what you’re doing but what you’re reading, viewing, thinking. Vary your tweets. Link to blog posts and articles you’ve found interesting and tell your followers why.
5. Engage - it’s easy to be passive but you’ll get more out of Twitter if you get involved. If someone asks a question answer it. If someone posts something of interest to you retweet it. Make yourself visible and get involved. It goes back to that old saying you get out what you put in.