Twitter - an update

Have been following some Twitter accounts. 

These include @CILIPinfo, @bournemouthuni and @BPCollegeSports.  These are all helpful in keeping up-to-date with the latest news and events - both at a national and local level.

Professional network - LinkedIn

So far two colleagues have invited me to connect with them on the professional network - LinkedIn.

It's a very well established network, which currently claims to have over 225 million members.  Seems good if you want to promote your online presence and manage your professional identity.  It helps with career advancement and staying informed about what your contacts are up to and what's happening in your industry.  I noticed that BPP - a company I deal with - are members. 



LibraryThing - a social cataloguing site

Have added a new gadget - a bookshelf - after investigating the social cataloguing site LibraryThing.

The contents of the bookshelf were actually inspired by being a member of a work book group which has face to face monthly meetings.  Through it I discovered what a fascinating book the classic Brave New World by Aldous Huxley actually is.  One of those books, like Orwell's 1984, I've always meant to get round to reading at some point.  It encouraged me to hunt out other titles Huxley wrote - fiction and non-fiction.

Through LibraryThing I now have another warm, welcoming 'community' of book lovers to investigate and share thoughts with in more depth.  This time an online one with thousands of members across the world.

Yahoo buys Tumblr - reported price tag £723 million!

As you can see this blog is powered by Blogger, currently owned by Google.

Another blog tool - Tumblr - has this week been bought by Yahoo for an amazing £723 million.   The BBC reports that many Tumblr bloggers are dismayed and fear Yahoo will interfer adversely, despite assurances to the contrary from Yahoo.

WordPress - a rival blogging platform - reported that more than 72,000 people imported their Tumblr blogs to WordPress in just one hour on 19th May.

CitULike - the serious social bookmarking service

Have started to investigate CitULike, which is likened to "Everyone's Library". I don't normally associate the words "social" and "serious" together, but CitULike is both. It's a free service to help you to store, organise and share the scholarly papers you are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. You can 'tag' articles to file them together.

The sharing comes about by the ability to join groups, or even form your own. I joined a group called "Librarians" and found a very diverse range of articles posted by other members. Many of the articles didn't seem related to librarianship in any way! For example,

"Characterization of axial and proximal histidine mutations of the decaheme cytochrome MtrA from Shewanella sp. str. ANA-3: Implications for the electron transport mechanism" from the Journal of Bacteriology (24 August 2012).

Possibly a bit too scholarly for me!

Pearltrees - a happy discovery

Pearltrees is a social bookmarking site which describes itself as "a place to collect, organize and share everything you like on the web". I created an account for Pearltrees so long ago I've forgotten my log in details!  So you can tell how much use it was to me.  

However yesterday all that changed!  Have been looking for sources of copyright free images, and the Pearltree on the BPC Library 2.0 blog gave me one - pixabay.com

Am very happy!  It shows me that even if a tool isn't initially of help, it's still worth exploring in case it is in the future.  The image below is from pixabay.com

TweetDeck by Twitter

As I've now got both work and personal Twitter accounts, I thought I'd investigate ways of managing them better.  TweetDeck is an app which seems quite useful as I can easily view both accounts on one page. 

It's got lots of other features which I'll investigate in the future.

It does describe itself as "an app that brings more flexibility and insight to power users." Cannot describe myself as a "power user" quite yet!



Blogroll

I love all the new words I'm learning. 

For example, blogroll - simply a list of the blogs or other sites that you enjoy visiting and that you'd like to show to others who access your blog.

Have created one which I can add to during my journey.

Why this blog exists

This blog continues my journey engaging with and reflecting on Web 2.0 technologies.