Thing 4(c): P-push it: real good?

I’d not heard of Pushnote before signing up for cpd23 and, judging by others’ tweets and blogs this week, neither had many other people. Moreover, most people seemed to be distinctly underwhelmed by their first interaction with it.

I don’t know - I kinda liked it. It’s quite interesting, although of dubious professional utility, to learn that on Wednesday the third most popular webpage among Pushnote users was Bill Bailey’s message to Metallica. I’m still puzzling out how most of the features work (for example, I haven’t rated or shared anything yet), but I think I’ll continue to fiddle with it for at least a couple more weeks, before probably forgetting all about it. (The icon that appears on your toolbar after you’ve installed the Pushnote add-on is curiously easy to ignore.)

I think Pushnote’s problem is twofold. Firstly, although it’s a truism, to be successful an application like this has to fill a need (sometimes one that users didn’t even know they had until the application came along). RSS feeds obviously do this, in that they eliminate the need to trog repeatedly around the internet visiting your favoured websites and instead deliver new content straight to you. Twitter also does this, by providing a way to converse with others, share links and ask for help or advice, all in real time and in a much more immediate way than other applications.

Does Pushnote work on a need-to-use, as opposed to a nice-to-use, basis? It’s doubtful: there are already plenty of ways to share recommended websites with friends and colleagues. And if you’re a visiting a particular site or page under your own impulse, then it’s just as easy to have a quick look at the site yourself and come to your own conclusions, rather than relying on the comments of a bunch of people you don’t know off the internet.

Secondly, any social networking or sharing tool obviously works better the more users there are to network and share with, and I don’t think Pushnote has reached that tipping point. From the various websites I’ve looked at, even ones that must be heavily visited such as the Guardian’s website and IMDB have not received many comments. In many cases, comments that have been left mainly date from January 2011, when the service was first launched; there are comparatively fewer recent comments, which probably tells its own story.

Lord knows I am nobody’s idea of an early adopter, so it is a bit strange for me to be kicking around in an application that has yet to reach a critical mass of users. I don’t think at the moment that Pushnote is anywhere near as indispensable as Twitter or RSS feeds (or, no doubt, other tools I’ve yet to discover) but I’ll hang on for a little while longer just to be sure.

Thing 4(b): Feed demon

Google Reader is another tool that I’d never used until this week and which I’m already wondering how I managed without.

Setting it up was fairly easy. At home, running Firefox, it worked like a dream. At work, using Chrome, I hit a bit of an obstacle, as hitting the feed button on web pages seems not to connect to Google Reader but instead returns screeds of XML data. (I gather this is more likely to be Chrome’s fault than mine and is probably fixable using some sort of workaround or extension; but it is slightly vexing that Google’s browser doesn’t work smoothly with Google’s feed reader.)

Anyway, as long as I’m using Firefox I now have numerous feeds set up and am finding it mightily useful, not to say indispensable. I did subscribe to the full feed of all cpd23 blogs but found the constant influx of new, unread material slightly too much, so I deleted that; now I’m picking up selected blogs and websites as I come across them. I am staying on top of my feeds chiefly by skim reading rather than studying each new item in-depth, and “starring” posts that I particularly enjoy or may want to refer back to in future.

I know the problem of information overload is a perennial concern, and I can’t be sure that I won’t fall disastrously behind on my reading – in fact, I’m almost certain I will. I’m kind of relying on the idea that the really important or interesting stuff will be re-blogged or retweeted so much that it becomes almost impossible to miss.

Thing 4(a): Twitter sweet symphony

I appear to have got a bit carried away writing up this week’s task, so I’ve decided to do three separate posts, to break up the text a bit.

Thing 4 of cpd23 is about current awareness and suggests three tools to help today’s busy information professional keep on top of news and developments. Since at the moment my current awareness activities extend to randomly visiting bookmarked websites and failing to remove my copy of CILIP Update from its polythene wrapper every month, I figure I could do with some help in this area.

First up is:

Twitter

Up until now I have been a Twitter abstainer on the twin assumptions that:

1. It’s full of people broadcasting banalities about their day-to-day business

2. I don’t particularly want to broadcast banalities about my own day-to-day business (and you can read below to find out how that’s working out for me).

However, the point of taking part in this course, and the point of professional development in general, is to discover new sources of information and ways of working, right? Also, the impression I’ve hitherto had of Twitter is that it is solely a means of spewing out your own thoughts; I had never even considered the possibility that it also functions as a sort of news feed, allowing you to receive other people’s opinions and news.

So now I have a Twitter account (@dianajwright). I wish I’d read thewikiman’s 3 essential things to do AS SOON AS you join Twitter before setting it up, since I had comprehensively failed to do any of them. This has since been rectified and I must say that I have really, unexpectedly, enjoyed my first week on Twitter.

I am following an assortment of real-life colleagues, cpd23 participants, other library and information professionals (principally those tweeting about open access and repository issues) and a few media types and famouses. From them I have picked up an astonishing amount of news, ideas and useful links, and I also feel much more engaged with my peers and my profession than before (for example, I don’t think I would have found out about the proposed North East cpd23 meet up, or at least not so quickly, if I wasn’t on Twitter). I am also following a few hashtags and saved searches: #cpd23 (natch), #uklibchat, #libday7 and #openaccess.

In spite of my hatred of the term “profersional” that’s approach I’m taking with regard to my own tweets, partly because a feed of nothing but library/work stuff could end up being a little one-sided and dry, but mainly because, with the zeal of a new convert, I’m finding it too damn hard not to broadcast my every random thought. (It took me just three days to begin tweeting about my lunch and, what’s more, I don’t even care.)

I do have a couple of caveats:

1. I’m still not au fait with all aspects of Twitter etiquette, such as having a direct conversation with another twitterer and properly crediting people via retweets, but I’m sure I’ll pick it up soon enough; and

2. I am a bit concerned about its potentially deleterious effects on my already-ravaged attention span.

Nevertheless, I have found Twitter about a million times more engaging and useful than I anticipated. I will definitely keep using this, at least for the duration of the cpd23 programme, by which time I will probably have a Twitter monkey the size of King Kong on my back.

I can quit anytime I want, right?! (Picture by carrotcreative)