LinkOut? - Thing 23 reflections

Nice wee article in the back pages of this week's New Scientist (27 March 2010; p.76) about LinkedIn. The Feedback author reports his experiences of joining LinkedIn, only to be contacted with requests from strangers who turned out to be "fraudsters": "It seems our Nigerian scammers have moved on from simple phishing and are now building social networks."

Maybe I'll LinkOut in future.

A reminder to self about 23 Things

Week 1 – Introduction and personalised homepages (drop-in Monday 18/01/10 14:00-17:00)
1. Set up your Google ID -yep
2. Customise your iGoogle page so that it contains at least 5 gadgets - yep: recipes, news, word of the day, gmail, wikipedia
Week 2 – Blogging
3. Create your own 23 Things blog and make your first post - ha ha sounds silly now, doesn't it?
4. Register your 23 Things blog and explore others - must explore other blogs....
Week 3 – RSS Feeds
5. Sign up for GoogleReader and add the RSS feed from the 23 Things blog - yes, done.
6. Find some more feeds to subscribe to - subscribe to far too many feeds! over 120 now!
Week 4 - Online photos and images (drop-in Wednesday 10/02/10 14:00-17:00)
7. Create a Flickr account, upload some of your own photos, tag them and add descriptions - done...
8. Go to the Picnik site and connect to your Flickr account, try out the different editing tools on your photos and save them back to Flickr - done. particularly liked this one. see pic of boat.
Week 5 - Social bookmarking and tagging
9. Sign up for a Delicious account, bookmark and tag some of your favourite web sites - came in handy during trials registers training session.
10. Add other Delicious users to your network so that you can easily view their bookmarks - not so handy unless colleagues join delicious!
Week 6 - Podcasting / YouTube (drop-in Monday 22/02/10 09:00-12:00)
11. Find and listen to some podcasts which interest you - must still explore Oxford Learning Institute podcasts. Like listening to Radio 4 news quiz and other friday night comedy as podcast.
12. Search YouTube for some videos on a topic of your choice and discover YouTube channels - done. Prefer YouTube for music videos but can see uses for libraries.
Week 7 - Social networking
13. Write a blog post about how libraries can use different features of Facebook to connect with their users - done. Not convinced this is so useful for HCL.
14. Explore http://learn.linkedin.com/ and sign up for LinkedIn - done. But not found useful yet. Probably will be more useful when I get engrossed in my dissertation!
Week 8 - Twitter
15. Sign up for Twitter and find people to follow - must tweet more... about kidneys etc...
16. Start engaging with your network using @replies and retweets - yes.. good point.
Week 9 - Wikis
17. Explore and contribute to a wiki - Oxford Libraires wiki.
18. Discover Wikipedia - discovered it years ago!
Week 10 - Office 2.0
19. Create a Google Document and share it with another 23 Things participant - dissertation proposal agonised over.
20. Sign in to ThinkFree Office with your Google ID and try its Write application - didn't find this helpful at all. Slow!
Week 11 - Widgets
21. Use a blogger Gadget to display your Flickr photostream on your blog. - very nice toy.
22. Use a widget to put your Delicious bookmarks on your iGoogle page - also useful reminder of delicious bookmarks.
Week 12 - Summary of experiences
23. Summarise your thoughts on the 23 Things @ Oxford programme and register completion via Google Form - kind of what i'm doing now but will do properly next week!

iGoogle word of the day

vivacious	(adjective) Full of animation and spirit; lively.
Synonyms:	vibrant
Usage:	She was no longer the alert, vivacious American beauty who had charmed and delighted all who came in contact with her.

I'm not particularly vivacious, but can name a few friends who are.

Things 21 and 22: Gadget, Widget

Right. Done Things 21 and 22: Added my Flickr photostream to this 'ere blog, which is rather cool, and added my delicious bookmarks to my iGoogle page. And reorganised my iGoogle gadgets while I was at it, deleting some of the news feeds and having a look at my Google Reader feeds (still prefer Bloglines, by the way).

So. Nearly finished with 23 Things. And can smell cigarette smoke, which has absolutely nothing to do with 23 Things, but which is horrible when you're sat in an air-conditioned library office and spent much of yesterday afternoon in the cockpit of our boat breathing in fumes from our neghbour's generator. (Why does Jamie have to run a generator at all?? Get a few solar panels, run 12-volt gadgets, no problems).

There. I can grumble on my blog. Hee hee.

Wikipedia blog post

Krafty Librarian has blogged about Wikipedia here: http://kraftylibrarian.com/?p=473 which suggests that medical librarians in particular 'hate' wikipedia, as it isn't an evidence-based resource etc. Well, one reads everything with a critical eye, so I'd tend to disagree. As long as students etc don't just rely on wikipedia to find out how to treat otitis media or somesuch.

Things 19 and 20

Most impressed with Bibliophile in Cyberspace's blog on the Things for this week:
http://bibliocy.blogspot.com/2010/03/googledocs-and-thinkfree.html

(that's all from me for now)

Thing 20: ThinkFree Office

ThinkFree Office, http://www.thinkfree.com/, is slow and clunky and not nice. I tested it out, typing up some notes from a book I wish I'd read last week before I sent off my dissertation proposal: Your Masters Thesis: How to plan, draft, write and revise. !!

That's Thing 20 done for. I doubt I'll use ThinkFree Office in Real Life. Google Docs, yes, but not this application.

Thing 19: I've created a Google Document!

I uploaded my MSc dissertation proposal to Google docs, and then realised that I posted two copies of this to Newcastle on Friday without altering the title. Not sure the title makes great sense:

“Reaching out to healthcare library users:

Using the Delphi method to gather expert recommendations about promoting and evaluating healthcare outreach library services”


So I've changed it to:

“Reaching out to healthcare library users:

A Delphi study to gather expert recommendations on the most effective methods to promote and evaluate healthcare outreach library services”



Which one is better? Which one makes sense? Am I going to be horribly penalised for having such a stupid title?

Google documents could be extremely useful. I'm trying to create a newsletter at the moment for a community group I'm a director of (for my sins). I'm writing and creating it using Publisher, but as the others don't have access to this programme, I've had to send out the drafts as PDFs to everyone. Really not very efficient! I'll explore this functionality further.........

Wikis: Things 17 and 18

Are we on things 17 and 18 already? Good!

Wikipedia is a very useful tool, even if it isn't all that reliable and you get told off for referencing it in MSc essays (who? me?! well, if I admit to this heinous crime then I only referenced a Wikipedia page cos the stupid people at Northumbria Uni can't reference their workbooks properly, and the only reference I could find for a management thing was on this particular website!). You can find out the dates of birth for famous actors and musicians, you can look up lyrics or lines from poems and find out more information, you can look up stuff about kidney diseases for quick reference.

I must admit that I've never bothered with the History of a Wikipedia page before, but yes, good stuff and helpful in the reliability stakes.

As for wikis generally, I'm signed up to an OULS/ Bodleian Libraries wiki, but never had the opportunity to use it. The http://socialouls.wetpaint.com/ site is good to know about, particularly the Web 2.0 links on this page http://socialouls.wetpaint.com/page/Bibliography+%26+useful+links.

Does this count for my Things for this Week? I hope so, as I need to get on with my day job!

Twits and twats

We were encouraged to join Twitter and start tweeting updates to the NHS Evidence specialist collections back in October. I joined Twitter and started tweeting. And then felt that it is more appropriate for following what Sarah Brown has had for breakfast than for serious evidence-based medicine-related information. The kidney diseases and male urogenital disorders twitter feed is here: https://twitter.com/NHSEvidenceKDMU

Since October, I've only tweeted 13 times, and have 12 followers. Some of the kidney charities I'm following have useful things from time to time, but generally, I'm afraid, I forget to update the feed and so am a bad Twitterer. Someone from another specialist collection said that they've hooked up their collection RSS feed to Twitter, to directly tweet those feeds.

Anyway, I am glad that I've played with this toy, but will stick to other Web 2.0 toys in future.

Thing 14: LinkedIn

http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/eli-bastin/1a/b72/551

I've done it. I've signed up for LinkedIn. I'm not sure why though, as I'm happy with my networking skills and contacts at the moment but hopefully this will prove useful when I attend professional conferences later this year, unlike Facebook, which is more for fun and informal stuff.

Thing 13: Libraries using Facebook

I joined Facebook a few years ago to keep in touch with friends from University. I went to a party and discovered that everyone was using this social networking site to keep in touch (!!), post photos of themselves at parties etc, and I felt left out.

I'm not a Friend of any libraries. If I need to know when the Social Science Library will close tonight, i'm afraid that I'll go to their website to find out instead of looking on Facebook. I know that various Oxford libraries have Facebook pages to connect with their readers, and maybe that is more appropriate for the libraries with undergraduate users. Our library is more serious than that (hee hee) and so I think Facebook is inappropriate for health care.

Having said that, I can keep in touch with fellow medical librarians on Facebook for informal purposes, to strengthen friendships and improve my morale when I'm fed up with the NHS project I spend 80% of my working life on. No bad thing, that...