pafa.net

I have to admit to a love-hate relationship with Twitter, the microblogging “what are you doing?” tool that many people are, shall we say, twittering about. Some days I love being tuned into all the goings on in my community there, other days, I just need to tune out.

140 characters, enough to say where you are during a conference and find out who wants to meet for dinner. Or to find out where there’s a great session going on so you can leave the deadly dull one that you ended up in by mistake. I’ve used it a lot during conferences and had great meetups with colleagues I would have missed otherwise.

On a day to day basis, it’s very useful for sharing breaking news, alerts about interesting blog posts, posing questions and getting fast answers. Many organizations are using it to connect with customers, patrons, supporters. Political campaigns use twitter to alert supporters to the latest campaign news. Libraries use it as one more way to distribute updates about services and events. Library professional groups use it to get news out to members and the library community at large.

What you get out of it, depends on finding friends and colleagues who share your interests. And like any community, you have to give to get. So I try to respond to questions when I can and share new resources that I come across. In return I’ve gotten help with questions of my own. Will I stay with Twitter forever? Will I be fickle and love it and leave it? I don’t know, it has had some problems keeping up with traffic lately. If they continues, people will certainly move on to another tool that serves the same purpose, and there are other ones out there! For now, I’m finding Twitter a useful way to connect with friends and colleagues.

To find out more and see some great examples of how libraries are using Twitter, read Elyssa Kroski’s terrific article in School Library Journal, All a Twitter: Want to Try Microblogging? It’s an excellent introduction to Twitter. And even if you don’t get into using Twitter yourself, it’s definitely a tool to be aware of.

From DIGtrends: Leave comments on the THIS CAN’T WAIT post and they’ll donate $10 to the US Campaign for Burma.

As part of our commitment to the people of Burma, Digital Influence Group will contribute $10 to the U.S. Campaign for Burma for each unique, non-spam comment or trackback to this post, up to $5,000 total. The deadline for commenting is May 31, 2008, because for Burma: It Can’t Wait.

Commoncraft does it again. Twitter in Plain English is a great explanation of why Twitter is so popular. What are YOU doing? 140 characters or less please.

There are social networking sites out there for every interest. Well, at least there are for most of my interests. Even though I’m not much of a knitter, I enjoy lurking at ravelry.com. And now there’s myfolia.com. I didn’t go looking for this site, it found me through flickr.  Social networking connecting me with more social networking! myfolia connects you with gardeners in your growing zone and around the world. Share photos of your garden from flickr. Share your gardening notes and more. I’m really looking forward to exploring this one some more.

Laura Cohen and Trudi Jacobson (U of Albany Libraries) have put together a terrific new guide to Evaluating Web Content, with particular attention being paid to blogs, wikis, social networking, multimedia sources and more.

10 years ago, Trudi and Laura collaborated on what I’ve always considered the definitive guide to evaluating web content. Their new guide is equally invaluable.

From Laura’s blog post Evaluating Web Content in the 2.0 Era:

“In a way, it’s fair to say that evaluative criteria don’t really change based on the type of site or material encountered. While this may be true, it’s also the case that students need help with looking for cues in different types of environments. In fact, some students aren’t even sure what they’re looking at.”

Here I am, sitting all alone in my home office. It’s just me and the fish. I used to feel pretty isolated working alone. No longer. I have so many friends and colleagues right at my fingertips.

Sure, I have my email running all day long. But that doesn’t feel as immediate as it used to. And I have to confess, IM is just a bit TOO immediate and distracting for this over 50 brain. What I do rely on are

(more…)