Thing 4 - Current Awareness

Thing 4 for the 23 Things for Professional Development program is Current Awareness. It focuses on RSS Feeds, Twitter, and Pushnote.

RSS Feeds
At least I already have RSS feeds (mostly) covered. I use Google Reader to manage feeds from various sites I'm following. My Miss Scarlet Gmail address just follows CPD23 and library blogs and it's pretty handy. It's not so handy with sites that update very frequently (like LISNews), which tend to overwhelm the feed. You lose a little something without being able to see a blog's design, but the counter to this is having something very plain to read which doesn't advertise 'hey, look what I'm looking at right now!'

Here are the sites I'm currently tracking in Google Reader with the Miss Scarlet account:

• A Librarian learns about Web 2.0!
• All Comprehension is Temporary
• Boolean Berry: Adventures in Librarianship
• I Can Read Big Words Now: A Newly Qualified Librarian's CPD23 Blog
• Librarian in a Nutshell
• London library girl
• Notes from the Basement
• Nouveau Librarian
• Odd Librarian Out
• ook librarian
• Rachel's Smaller CPD23 Adventure
• Reflections and ponderings: a librarian's perspective
• Rhythm & Knowledge
• Sarah Said Library
• The Hobbit Hole
• Trails and Trials of a Trainee Librarian
• Wee Librarian
• Younggeekylibrarian's Blog

Some of you have not been posting!

Twitter
Oh, Twitter. I've tried to have Twitter accounts before - a personal one I made just to get into the Library of Congress without intention to actually post anything (I wound up replying to tweets from a friend about a wedding I couldn't attend, for which I appreciated the live updates even if I couldn't quite figure out why said friend was messing with his phone the whole time), and an account for the older version of this blog, Lagomorph Watson (don't worry, all the old posts are imported here, don't bother to go looking). I tried to use the latter to follow a site or two, but again, post quantity was crazy.

I am admittedly at a loss with regards to how to use Twitter in relation to this site. I suppose I could tweet new posts, which would be redundant if anyone was using feeds but useful if they were not. Do I tweet anything else? Is this where I can share things that aren't library-related? Doesn't quite seem so. In any case, I made a new one: lib_scarlet.

Having a personal brand that includes a colour scheme is useful here. While picking a template for my shiny new Twitter feed, I just had to look at ones with red. That narrows down selection!

Pushnote
I decided to link my Pushnote to my Twitter Account. Hopefully, by marrying these two services I'm not sure about, I'll get more use out of them, kind of like Voltron except without any awesome cartoon battles. I'm not linking to Facebook, which I am still keeping separate.

Now let's see how fast my inbox fills up and how long I actually keep Twitter and Pushnote.