#cpd23 Thing 4

Current awareness - Twitter, RSS feed and Storify
In this Thing we'll explore a few tools that  will help you to keep up-to-date and aware of goings on in the library and  information world, and make it easy to share news and stories with others
So as you're probably aware I am already on Twitter, have been for about 4 years, and I love it.  I follow authors, publishers, librarians and book bloggers.  Although I follow about 450 people, I have a locked 'quick check' list of about 100 that I look at regularly as I don't find the time to keep up with the whole stream!  I've never joined in with a twitter chat, keep meaning to but am never at a computer at the right time, but I do use #hashtags quite often.

iGoogle with Google Reader RSS has been my homepage on my laptop for quite some time - again, I follow a number of book bloggers through there, and a few librarians mostly found through cpd23 lists.  There are maybe 100 blogs I follow so I just look at the summaries and click further to read more if something catches my eye, as again I wouldn't have time to keep up otherwise.  Blog post headings are very important!

Storify is the one thing I've come across but not tried - I really like the idea so have now created my own one about the CILIP Carnegie Kate Greenaway medals.  Mind you, I signed in with twitter and then fell at the first hurdle - it refuses to 'pin' the storify bookmarklet to my bookmarks :-( I carried on anyway, searching in twitter for #ckg2012, and I embedded the url of the CKG website as well as a couple of YouTube videos of book trailers.

I had a quick glance at other cpd23ers efforts on storify but personally I think the most useful of the three is twitter.  You can skim through 140 character notes and click 'favourite' on items to look at more closely later.  People include links to really useful things from all sorts of sources, including blog posts meaning that an RSS feed becomes less important in making you aware of what is new.  It can be accessed from all sorts of mobile devices and so from anywhere, and again if you see a link you can't follow from your phone then you can just 'favourite' it to look at when you reach a PC.  You do have to use it regularly to make it worth having, I probably look 3 or 4 times a day but tweet less often than that.  To grow your follower base you need to tweet though!  I tweet mini-reviews of what I've read as well as links to things I find interesting in the library/book world.