#cpd23, Thing 4: current awareness

I was introduced to Twitter, to RSS feeds and to Google Reader last year during Cam23.  I'm a regular and committed user of them all.

Re-reading last year's posts, I see that I was particularly perceptive early on about the benefits of Twitter:

...if you have a wide circle of followers and followees, Twitter seems to good for spreading information and ideas quickly.  And it seems that, unlike with RSS feeds, it's information that you might not know you want to go looking for... 

The use of hashtags seems to make it possible to create a community of people interested in the same thing, and to widen knowledge about that thing and get a buzz going around it...

I wasn't, however, completely sold then, I wasn't sure if I'd stick at it.  That was a feeling that persisted for quite a while - I wondered if I'd go back to it after weeks away for holidays, Christmas, etc.  But I do go back.  It's important to remember that you can't keep up with everything, and just to let it waft by when you're too busy to pay attention.  But it's an invaluable way to meet people, share ideas, get answers and make things happen.  I'm feeling chuffed with myself this month for having introduced to each other some of the people who've gone on to organise #uklibchat.

'Yesterday News' by Zarko Drincic on Flickr

RSS is great for bringing the news to you - I use it for comics I follow, knitting blogs I follow, podcasts I like, institutional news, and a whole slew of library/librarians blogs.  The key, for me, is to remember that you don't have to read it all.  Some of the stuff I subscribe to is stuff I always look at when it comes in.  The rest, and this is by far and away the majority I either glance at and deicide to read later (or not), or is just there in case I want to fill some time with reading.  But mostly, I don't read a lot of it. Some of it I hear about via Twitter, some of it I just 'mark as read'.  There's no shame in not keeping up with everything - but RSS gives you a fighting chance if you're really keen to try!

A Google Reader feature I've recently started using is the 'shared items' feature. You can follow other people and see what they've chosen to share, and people who follow you can see what you share.  You can leave notes and comments on shared items, too.  It's a nice way to pick up on things outside feeds you follow.  To follow someone, the easiest way that I've found is to search for their Google profile (here's me - you can use the search box from the top of that page - and here are the things I've shared) and look for links to their shared items.  Otherwise use the shared items option in reader and search for people there.

Now, as for Pushnote, the word on Twitter and other blogs is that it's not great. And so I'm just not looking at it. Sorry.

As for other things useful to current awareness, I wonder sometimes if I ought to use Delicious as a stuff-discovery tool.  But you'd have to have very specific tags in mind for that to be very useful - event/theme hashtags, maybe?  It's not something I've really explored.

For your reading pleasure

Would you like to follow all the Cam23 bloggers at once?  Then follow this link to a shared feed (complete as of lunchtime today).  You can subscribe with Google Reader, or load the OPML file into other feed readers.  I hope.

Please let me know if there are any problems or comments - I'm very new to this creating content malarky and I'm very open to feedback.

Edited to add: I updated the feed on Saturday evening (5 June) to include 9 new blogs, and will try to make sure that any further additions are also included.  Please let me know if anything's missing.

"Who will not change a raven for a dove?"

Well, what a difference a day or two makes...

With a little more time to play with iGoogle I realised that it really wasn't going to meet my RSS needs. Although it can bring together several feeds on one page, they're still spatially disparate - you have to look at each one in turn to see what's there. Looking at them on one page is quicker than loading up each page from my bookmarks, but it's still not ideal. More annoyingly, I couldn't work out how, at a glance, to see which things were new, and which weren't.

The links I've followed to source have gone purple (though that's not very clearin this screen shot), to show that they're visited links, but they wouldn't be if I were logging in from a different computer, or if my browser history on this computer had been deleted. And what about those stories I've looked at in the reader and not followed? I don't want to have to remember what I've seen and not seen - I want the tool to do that for me, and to show me clearly what's new!

Things *are* clearer when I expand the gadget - the new items are dark, and the read ones are pale. But to check this out, I have to expand each widget in turn.


If you're still reading this far, you've probably guess where this is going... a feed reader. LottieMSmith recommended that I try Bloglines. I'm afraid I didn't follow that advice, and simply because I didn't want to set up yet another new account right now (having created all-new email and Google accounts for 23 Things). Despite my qualms about being logged into Google all the time (it feels a bit like selling my soul, somehow), I've set up a Google Reader account, and am loving it.

Although it isn't immediately obvious where some of the features are, there's facility to organise feeds into folders (hurrah for more categorisation!), and you can choose to see all your new stories together in one window, or by folder, or for each individual feed. The overview of your folders and feeds on the left-hand side quickly shows you what's new where, and the overall feel is definitely of the internet coming to me, and not vice versa.