Thing 4 : Keeping up

Twitter : @ales3
Well as you can see from above i am on twitter and i have been for a while, like many i started not sure what to do with it and following celebs and not really seeing the point. However in recent times i have attended a number of CILIPS and CIGS events where social media and its professional uses has been punted, this inspired me to start looking for more library related tweeters (should that be twitchers?) and i have found i am getting more interesting news in my twitter feed. I am still more of a lurcker than a contributer, which i will need to work on but i am finding that there is still lots i need to learn about twitter, following the right people for me seems to be the key and i am getting much better at this. Alison Tyler gives some excellent advise to ease that need to read everyhting that you see on your feed and I have found that i am begining to get the mind set required to just read what's there when i log in, rather than trying to catch up with conversations past. Twitter is a live in the moment kind of thing.

RSS
I have subscribed to various RSS feeds before but that is about the extent of it, i have created a google reader account now and will need to play around with it before i can really judge but any tool that helps you filter our the wheat from the chaff has got to be useful. I am intrigued by those that are torn between twitter and RSS, as i haven't made best use of either yet i shall wait and see if this happens to me!

Storify
I like the concept but like many others i am tied to Internet explorer at work, however i understand there are lots of other similar tools out there and will be keeping my eye on this as a useful way to communicate with our customers.

In the end these tools are great for keeping up to date and from the general feeling of the blogs i've looked at it seems to be a case of horses for courses, everyone seems to have their favourites which fit in with their life and work style and although it may be tempting we don't have to use everything, just keep aware of what tools are out there and what they can do for us. After all, they are tools, designed to help us not hinder us, in the end i will be choosing to use the ones that i find useful but keeping my eyes on the available tools as circumstances change, what is useful to me now may not be later on. I enjoy testing out new things and sometimes they come as a revelation, other times i have found myself revisiting (like twitter) once i have got a better understanding of what it can do for me.