Thing #31: More Twitter

We're really just getting off the ground with Twitter. I'm following several different news sources (some of which surprisingly found and friended us out of the blue (like the Minnesota Daily -- wonder how they found us? It's a nice little boost!)

At first I had the profile under my own name with my photo. But as my colleague and I talked about it more and how we could both post Tweets, it seemed we should change that. So I took my name off it and posted a photo of the Library. We're talking about getting updates to our Library blog posted automatically to our Twitter feed. Under this Thing, it looks like TwitterFeed might be the way to do that. The instructions look pretty easy.

I might also start a personal Twitter account just for fun and my own personal use. I have to say, I was skeptical at first, but I'm enjoying looking at the news updates. I like the brevity of the messages with the option to click on the link for the whole story.

I'd say I'm at the Twitter stage of trying it out and considering how we might use it beyond just reading other people's feeds.

Thing #30: More Ways to Use RSS & Delicious

I understand the principle of RSS and how very useful it might be for some people, but I haven't incorporated it into my own life. (Come to think of it, maybe I subconsciously am by using My Yahoo as my personal home page. I continually get updates from various news sources by means of the widgets I've chosen. Not sure if that counts as RSS, but it does follow the same principle.)

Here have been my stumbling blocks: I subscribed to several feeds via Bloglines, but the number of posts got overwhelming. Plus, it meant remembering to go to Bloglines to check them. As it is, I have an established rhythm of checking a few sources regularly, and adding the Bloglines routine felt overwhelming: too much info.

That said, I could subscribe to or just read selected feeds. But I ran into an email problem. My feeds were automatically going to my email inbox at work, and it was way too much of a good thing. My inbox was getting bombarded and filling to capacity. Finally, I turned off that function. Now I can't figure out how to turn it back on in Outlook, though I've followed the directions. (SIGH) Oh well, getting off topic...

I am using my blog's home page, though, to check on updates of a few of my favorite blogs by means of the blogroll. I like how it puts the most recently updated blog at the top and lets you know when it was updated.

Now, delicious I've been using and loving for more than a year. We have a Library account to which we add useful bookmarks that we and our users will find valuable. I also have a personal delicious account. I love being able to find my bookmarks on any computer, and I love how easy it is to add sites by means of the toolbar. I also like how you're able to find the most popular sites for particular tags.

Right now on our Library home page we have a link to our delicious account, where viewers can peruse our sites with most recently added at the top. But what I'd like to do is take advantage of the tagging to use them for subject guides.

Oh -- and I added the Library's delicious links to my blog, with the tag cloud displayed. Pretty cool to see!

Thing #29: Google Tools

Great tools here, for sure! They're fun and powerful.

The first one I tried was Google News. I hadn't realized you could get headlines and stories aggregated in Google from so many places. I tried the archives search and was really impressed. Hadn't realized all this stuff was available outside of paid databases. I recently read All Quiet on the Western Front for a class I'm taking in WWI literature. So I typed "Erich Maria Remarque" in the News Archives search box. I got some really interesting results back to the time the book was published. Also an old New York Times article from when Remarque and Paulette Goddard were married.

Then I tried GMail. Or maybe I should say I retried GMail. At the urging of my son, I opened an account back in 2005 when it was brand new and only a select number of "invitations" were given out to join, and my son got me invited. But I didn't really use it -- not because I disliked it but because I was used to my Yahoo account and satisfied enough that I didn't see the need to change.

It was fun to sign back on and see that my old account was still there. I was impressed by GMail's spam-blocking power and also impressed by the various features that can be added.

I went back to the iGoogle page I created recently and had fun with that. I chose "Theme for a Day," which means each day you get a random new theme and had a pretty pattern by designer Anna Sui. In fact, Google has lots of designer themes. With the attractiveness and the useful options and the way all the features work together, I could see switching to iGoogle as my personal home page.