Thing 4-2012: Current awareness - Twitter, RSS, Storify and more

To stay up-to-date of goings on in my professional and not so professional world, I spend a lot of time on Google Reader. So I can only agree with the excellent explanation of Annie Johnson about RSS.

After the CPD23 session of 2011 I really got fascinated by twitter and its possibilities. So I examined it more and wrote some posts about it on this blog. One of the things, I was searching for, was the possibility to archive tweets in one form of another. Jo Alcock suggested Storify for that goal. You can read about it in this storify story or this post, where I embedded this story. In these posts you can read Storify is not only great to archive tweets, but it has also many possibilities outside the world of twitter. I’m still discovering more and more of them.

I only have one big problem with twitter: to put it mildly, it is very difficult to use at my workplace. But that is purely personal, of course.

Pushnote was the tool which received the most negative comments by cpd23 and cam23 participants last year. Now it is proven they were right: pushnote doesn’t exist any more. I don’t think there is big mourning.

I heard about scoop.it but I never tried it out. So this is a good occasion to give it a go. And… it was a good experience. It is even possible to add videos as you can see in my first little “scoop”.

I wrote already about paper.li in this post. I recommend everybody to try it out. It is fun.

Pulse is on my list to try out, but it will not be for today.

The only other similar tool, I tried out, is clipboard. I wrote about it in this post (points one and two). I tried it again for this post, but my mind didn’t change. It is better to use storify.

Maybe it is nice to try to embed some tools now. Annie Johnson already demonstrate storify in the introduction (as I did also in a post mentioned above). Let us start with scoop.it. Well, scoop.it doesn’t allow embedding like storify, but it offers you to build a widget which is a little bit adoptable. I show an example

A bit disappointing, isn’t it?

Paper.li offers two widgets. I added the one I like the most to the right column of this blog.

And to finish with embedding, I show an embedded clipboard clip:

To much self-reference on this post again. But it is necessary to end with some references to… myself on the tools we spoke about:

• my twitter account: @Radoveden

• my storify entry

• my scoop.it

• my paper.li

• my clipboard

Thing 3-2012: Consider your personal brand

Well, mostly I don’t publish on the internet under my real name. It is maybe a heritage from the nineties of last century, but I like it that way. People really wanting to, can find my real name very easily. It is even on illustrations and links, I provided on this blog. I just want to avoid people get to much information by just “googling” my name, which as a matter of fact is a very rare one.

To demonstrate my branding I start with showing you the timeline of my real name facebook account:

Here you see a cover photo, which I use as much as possible. The photo was made by my wife in a café in Russia, which contains a little museum of the Russian cinema. It has a lot of symbolic value and people can make of it whatever comes in their mind. Then there is my profile photo, which I always use when I’m publishing on the internet under my real name. Radoveden has another photo as you can see on this blog. Anyhow I hope everybody is convinced is a photo of the same person, namely me.

Furthermore I think it is important to connect (by linking, embedding,…) the different platforms you use to publish on the internet.

One more word about the vanity check

Jo Alcock wrote in her introduction: “Search for your name in Google and check out the first page or so of results (try to do this in a different browser or an incognito window whilst logged out of Google to get a truly objective view… (my emphasis)

The reason I want to emphasise this can’t be better explained than in this thought provoking video.

Thing 2 - 2012: Investigate some other blogs

I remember of last year that this “thing” was very intensive but also very interesting.

Well, this will be one of the things that I’ll skip this year. But… I’m still following the “CPD23 single feed” with Google Reader. So there will chances enough to interacted with other participants, which I certainly will do.

Google Reader is a tool of which I suspect it will be spoken of in “thing 4”.

Thing 1 - 2012: Blogs and blogging

With a little bit of delay I start with my “unofficial” CPD23 version 2012 run. As you can see I’m still running my tumblr blog which I started at the occasion of this course last year. Nevertheless I recommend blogger as the best blogging tool as far as I know. Tumblr isn’t a real blogging tool but “a thing” you can use for blogging purposes but I had to some additional efforts for it. It took for instance some time before I could provide the possibility to other people to make comments on my blog.

Clearing some misunderstandings about blogger

I read some strange things about blogger in blogs of other participants which simply are not true. Somebody suggested that blogger only works properly with the chrome browser. Well, I can testify blogger works perfectly with firefox, opera and internet explorer. I didn’t test it with other browsers, but I’m quite sure it works well with every modern browser.

Another blogger suggested it can be extremely difficult to close a blogger blog. I’m afraid she confused blogger with facebook. You can simply close your blog by going to the dashboard of your blog and then choose settings and then other from the menu on the left. Here you see on the top of the screen how to delete your entire blog

Not so difficult, isn’t it?

And now… some self-reference

For the rest, I can only repeat what I said a year ago when I started CPD23. I wrote also posts about blogger, wordpress, tumblr and posterous. If you want to read them, don’t forget to look in the comments on it. It happens I’m corrected there.

LinkedIn, gmail and RSS feeds

After my exploration through the worlds of twitter and facebook, I want to tackle LinkedIn a bit more, but I have to admit I neglected my LinkedIn during the past months.

Maybe it should be handy to be warned by a RSS feed when something interesting for me happened in LinkedIn. They send e-mails from time to time to the gmail-address I used to subscribe to their services. So my plan is to automatically move emails from the @linkedin.com domain from the gmail Inbox folder to a LinkedIn folder. It should be easy then to followed this new folder by a RSS feed.

Little note: Unlike many other e-mail systems, Gmail does not have folders in the technical sense of the word, it has labels. The main way in which labels differ from folders is that an email can have many labels applied to it, but can only be associated with one folder. For example, you could have a label for “Internet” and a label for “Bills”, and a bill for your Internet service could be labeled (and viewable) under both Internet and Bills. In a folder system, the email can only be in either the Internet or Bills folder, not both. So let us use the right technical term “label” from now on.

Let us start with the making of our “LinkedIn” label. We start by creating a filter by clicking the down-arrow in the search box.

A box appears where we fill out the search criteria

In my particular case I want e-mails coming from LinkedIn. The * before @ can stand for zero or more characters. With other words, we select all e-mails sent by an address ending on @linkedin.com.

Then we click “Create filter with this search”

Here we select “Skip the inbox” because there is no need to keep those mails in the inbox. We choose to apply to “move” the selected mails to the folder or label “LinkedIn”, which we create in the flight. We also choose to apply this to e-mails from the past and then we click “Create filter”.

And it is done! At this point I decided to do some more organizing and made some more labels the same way, for instance to keep my e-mails from facebook apart.

All we still have to do is to put https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/LinkedIn in our feedreader.

I was disappointed Google Reader didn’t accept this feed. The reason is it can’t handle feeds protected by userid and password. But I added the feed without problem to my private Netvibes page:

On another occasion I will write more about LinkedIn itself.

CPD23 version 2

Last year, I stumbled by accident into the initiatives of Cambridge librarians. There were two courses then, CPD23 (which seduced me) and CAM23 (which kept me follow the whole thing). Furthermore the participants of CPD23 learnt me a lot about libraries and librarians.

This week CPD23 starts again and I think it is good opportunity for librarians around the world to learn a lot and to make contact with other librarians. Btw. with librarian I simply mean somebody working in library.

I will not subscribe this year, but I will follow it and write posts about it. For the ease of the reader I will tag those posts with cpd23v2.

As non-librarian I will mostly write around the “internet things”, but I will read with pleasure also about the “library things” but I will let (mostly) professional library discussion for the professionals.