Twitter





Setting up my Twitter account was easy and I had a quick scout around it, on a personal level I don't think it is something I will get into on a regular basis. I added a couple of names to follow, Charlie Sheen seems to be the man of the moment, and William Shatner (because I'm a closet Trekkie!!).



You can click on my link on the right of the page. My account is private for the moment so you will have to be confirmed as a follower before you can access my account and check out my Twitterings!!!

There are lots of free 'follow me' buttons to choose from, just add a new HTML page element to your blog - copy and paste the code and away you go. I tried to use this cute image, but it was too big and I couldn't find the code for it to make it smaller.

Again, I think the potential  is here to do good things for the library; some libraries take the queries from Twitter and Facebook and add them to a reference page on their Wikis, this then enables all users to find quick accurate solutions to their questions. 'Banking' queries in this way gives all staff, especially evening staff that may not have access to staff email another avenue to locate new or changed library information.

I also found an updated list of Libraries that use Twitter that may be of interest, unfortunately they are all American, but at least they will give us some ideas on how we might utilise this application.

My story so far...

I've opened ssooo many accounts in the last couple of weeks, my little blue book has become a life saver, I can't go anywhere without it! For the most part I've used my gmail account and variations of my gmail password in an effort to keep it all in check, but for some reason I couldn't sign up to Delicious with my gmail account, even though it gave me the option to, so now I have a ymail account as well.


I've become a blogging convert. I've learnt how to set up a blog, edit and delete posts. How to add links, images and video. I've also figured out how to time release a post, so that it is published on a certain date - not bad for someone who knew very little about the workings of a blog a couple of weeks ago!

Time is moving on quickly though, and I haven't gone back to any of the social bookmarking sites that I set up, but I will when I have more time... we could use it as a way of sharing articles and information to do with the library without clogging up the email. I use Firefox at home and found that using Diggo was much simpler with Firefox shortcuts, you can capture a page, or you can mark it to read later - great stuff when you come across info that will be good for your studies! Subscribing to Google Reader and various RSS feeds was doddle, probably because they weren't new to me!

Creating the comic strip has been great fun, there is so much you can do with Bitstrip and it is all free!!! You can create you own scenes and characters - down to their hair and clothes, you can share your scenes and characters or you can keep them all to yourself. I had to create the 'library' scene from scratch because there wasn't one, my dialogue and humour are a bit hit and miss but I'm working on it!!

So, I've created clouds, tags, bookmarks, blogs, links, a comic strip and lots of other stuff, I've even copied and pasted some HTML into my blog template to show an animated tag cloud of my blog labels - phew that was a bit scary (saved my template first just in case I messed everything up). The more labels and tags you use the better the cloud.