Thing 8 (If I can be trusted)

Having righted the earlier mess I have now moved swiftly on to thing 8, and added the Doodle widget to my igoogle dashboard - and very nice it looks too!

I do like igoogle - I just don't often think to use it anymore. Maybe 23 things will get me back in the habit.

Now I just need to wait and see if anyone I invited to my Doodle meeting can make it. (And judging by my current brain state it might also be time for a cup of tea.)

,

oh the irony!

Having just told myself off quite sternly for not paying attention when setting up my Doodle meeting for thing 7 - I managed to post the blog post telling myself off, onto the wrong blog!!!!

For anyone who was paying attention, this post got published on the 23 things blog, not my own blog, and had to be swiftly deleted when I realised my mistake - but it will have already gone out in the RSS feeds to anyone following - note to self - seriously now, PAY ATTENTION!!!

Dooooooooodle

Well, its a bit later than expected, but it's time for thing 7. Schedule a meeting with Doodle, and so far it's not going all that well - mostly because of my dreadful attention span today! I was being told by Doodle, that though I should be able to log in with my Google ID (23katharine) my gmail address for it did not exist - so just to check I logged in to that email address. Not only does it exist, but it is FULL of spam and 3 people with rather dodgy usernames, which I won't repeat here, have invited me to chat with them BLOCK!!!!!

Anyway - after a few minutes of trying again, followed by 30 seconds of actually reading what was on the log-on screen (the activist in me was coming across rather strongly initially, and reading instructions was not the first thing on my mind) I noticed that I needed to tell Doodle I was using a google account - basic cyber-communication sorted and I am now in - note to self - PAY ATTENTION!!!!
So I have sent out invitations and will await responses - in the hope that I am not too late and everyone else hasn't done this already and is too busy to do it again!
To be continued. . .

RSS feeds

As I said in my earlier post I have used RSS feeds in various ways before. I have now subscribed to the 23Things blog RSS in my igoogle page and I think this will be a useful way to keep track of what's happening as the project progresses.

It's great that the orange symbol for RSS feeds is used all over the web, so you can see where you need to go to subscribe to any feed you come across that might be useful to you.

RSS feeds are a great example of how web 2 technologies are useful to students and researchers when they manage their own access to information, and the library web page Jen links to in the entry for RSS feeds on the 23Things blog demonstrates this - we are encouraging our library users to utilise these tools to keep up to date on published articles in their areas of interest. This in itself suggests that they are tools we, as library staff, should be aware of, and perhaps use ourselves as information workers.

igoogle

I have just set up my igoogle page. I've used igoogle before but not for a long time. I have added tools for news feeds weather updates and access to my google email account. I have also added the Warwick Library igoogle tool which was created some time ago by Charlotte Brown (for those who remember her).

I find igoogle quite an easy and intuitive platform to use and am now wondering why I ever stopped using it before. I will probably find tools in there during the course of 23 things that might persuade me to start using it again.

I have registered

Just a quick post to say that I have registered on the Warwick 23 things program :)

Why I am joining 23 things

I have just registered for 23 Things Warwick, even though I am part of the 23 Things project team I am sure there are things I can learn from joining the program. For example I don't know a lot about referencing tools, and they will be covered later on.

I think the 23 things program will be a great help to library staff, because web 2 tools are being used more and more by the people we support in the university and having a better understanding of how our users manage their information and communicate with each other will mean we are in a better position to understand the questions they ask and help them to achieve their goals. Not only that but there may be web 2 tools which we can use in our own working lives which can help us to manage our own information, or to communicate with our users in new ways, which will help support and publicise our services.

I do have fair amount of web 2 experience already, having used a range of tools in my personal life, including the obvious Facebook! But I have also found various professional uses for web 2 tools. The Enquiry Support team I belong to manage the Facebook and Twitter account for Warwick Library and use them to field and respond to enquiries as well as using them as marketing tools. we also use RSS feed agregators to pull together blog feeds (through a service called Yahoo pipes) from librarians at warwick and feed them into facebook and twitter, so that people who follow us on those services can also recieve updates from the library blogs.

In my previous role in Academic Support I also made use of the social bookmarking tool, Delicious.com to manage bookmarks of publishers web sites to help me in book ordering. And I use delicious in my personal life to keep track of weblinks that are of interest to me on a range of non-work topics.

I'm really looking forward to the rest of the program, and expect to learn a lot from it.