Runaway train

Well I think this whole cam23 thing and it’s things has gone off far too well. Where’s the cynicism? The nay-saying? the prognostications of doom and failure? The reluctance to join in? On a personal level I make it a policy point to say ” mmmm, sounds interesting but I’m not much of a joiner” to most things. I have tried to look at most people’s blogs as they crop up but have you seen how many there are?!? And for crying out loud it’s all full of interesting stuff too.

(For no reason that I can think of Mike Yarwood has suddenly popped into my head – that will mean nothing to those of you under 35 (or is it 40?))

Yesterday was busy so haven’t really kept track of all that’s been written and done by others. But it struck me that I missed out on one part of the things – where one talks about current 2.0 uses and experience.

List of things so far:

• google account: I have several most of them under pseudonyms and used for different purposes. For cam23 I created my igoogle page from my pre-existing libraryhelp account which I set up for the calendar, youtube account and mostly for the creation of slight mashups; the first being a map of undergrad projects and second a faculty & department libraries map. I also have a yahoo account which for work I used to create pipes – most successful so far is of departmental publications.
• rss: I’ve been subscribing to feeds for a couple of years now and I get them in my Thunderbird mail box. I find this method of receiving & reading feeds the most satisfactory – I had tried various aggrogators – as it’s not something else I have to launch, it’s there instantly with all my other daily things, including my calendar with tasks and events. I love thunderbird I think it’s a brilliant tool and version 3 with the tabs is miles better than anything else I’ve come across.
• Twitter, felt that it was inevitable so signed up a while ago but other than following people, posting an announcement about the fortnightly Library News being published and the odd exchange with a few other librarians or ex-students hadn’t really been using it much. As with rss feeds I think that the success of these tools on a personal level greatly depends on one finding a way one likes to get/receive/use these tools. Plug for echofon here, little firefox add-on wich sits in your status bar and pops up whenever a new message arrives. tried Tweetdeck but found it too much of a commitment.
• Have used doodle as participant – for the lovely journals coordination meeting – and as organiser to schedule post grad induction sessions
• Google calendar: libraryhelp has one but I use the Lightning calendar add-on for thunderbird, plus a FOSS  (free and open source software) calendar (http://www.ukrebs-software.de/) which sits on a shared drive for staff sharing and use.

Summing up my opinion of  all things google is very much one of if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. I believe slowly walking into an even more  google dominated Internet is something we have to be very careful of e.g. see ucs announcement about google apps – let’s not fool ourselves any of this is free: see those adds hat pop-up in your gmail? that’s the result of the price we pay – allowing a privately owned corporation to have access to, trawl through and use our data.

Nuff said.