Sometimes I go on the internet, but everyone's spelling is so bad it's depressing

Like many other 23 Things bloggers, I'm a big fan of YouTube. It's great when you're trying to remember an advert from ten years ago, or you want lots of funny videos about cats. Personally, I don't watch much 'user generated' content there, mostly because life's too short and there's just too much to keep up with. The BBC has an excellent presence, letting me catch up with little bits of shows rather than having to skim the iPlayer looking for the clip I want. The Muppets channel is also excellent, and hearing Beaker sing Ode To Joy is one of life's little pleasures.

I hadn't encountered YouTube EDU before, and I can see how it would be very useful as well, although I do wonder if it encourages students to stay in bed rather than come to lectures. Call be old-fashioned, but I do think there's something good about having to actually attend in person - I made some great friends that way while I was studying. On the other hand, if your lecturer's style is impenetrable, I can see how it would be useful to be able to go over it at your own speed, and especially for science subjects, where a lecturer can fill six or seven blackboards in the course of an hour, being able to see the talk as well as hear it could be invaluable.

When it comes to comments, YouTube is fairly notorious for being just about the bottom of the barrel, even for the internet. Personally, I don't ever read them, just in case. There's even a Firefox add-on so you don't have to - YouTube Comment Snob actually blocks the comments for you. I also think that, as usual, XKCD has it just about right:

Open letter

Dear Blogger,

I was not inclined to love you. It took me long enough to figure out my Livejournal, but at least over there people organise themselves into communities to help one another. I find the independent nature of blogs over here disconcerting, I find the menus hard to navigate, and I never seem to be able to find the option I want when I want it. Having said all that, I was prepared to give you a chance, hoping that the 23 Things programme would let me discover your inner beauty.

I still haven't given up on you completely, and oh, how I love being able to sign into everything with one ID, but if you don't start sending me the damn comment notifications, you and I are going to have a serious falling-out.

No love,

Me.

[later] PS. Okay, so it wasn't entirely your fault. Yahoo thinks your notifications are spam, so at least now I've found them. I'm still yet to be convinced, though. You have 13 more Things to win me over!

Pod-addicted

My most recent technology purchase was an iPod Touch, a considerable step up from my old, chunky MP3 player. It has lots of fun features, not least an addictive touchscreen game, but undoubtedly the best thing about it is how it handles podcasts. If I'm honest, I don't find iTunes the most instinctive programme in the world, and I have terrible trouble with my music on it since most of them are compilation albums and the tracks all come out in the wrong order. But when it comes to podcasts, iTunes is hard to beat, and they all show up beautifully on my touch.

I have subscriptions to twelve or so Radio 4 podcasts, which is essential for me, since the only thing the Touch doesn't have is a radio. I've been a Radio 4 listener since I was 13, and it's an impossible habit to break, so having something that will easily handle lots and lots of podcasts is just wonderful. In fact, I specifically bought the 32GB version so that I could keep the programmes on there for as long as I wanted.

My favourite podcasts are probably In Our Time and the Friday night comedy, but I also love More or Less and The Bottom Line. I tend not to listen to current affairs ones, since by the time I get round to listening to them, they're usually very out of date. A more recent discovery is iTunes U, and I'm still getting used to that one. The lectures are very good, but they lose something when you can't see the visual aids. Having said that, the Romp Through The History of Philosophy lecture is just brilliant, and I really enjoyed the Reception of Classics one as well. I miss studying, and being able to listen to actual lectures - not just talks/interviews put on for the sake of podcasting - is an absolute joy. My next stop is to investigate the BodCasts and some lectures from other universities, which I also think are a great idea. It'll be interesting to (for example) compare classics teaching here at Oxford to somewhere like Harvard or Sydney. My main problem with this kind of thing is that my eyes are bigger than my ears and things can languish on the 'unlistened to' list for a long time before I remember I've got them. Having said that, I could honestly fill my iPod with just Radio 4 podcasts and 2 or 3 music albums and be happy for months to come.

Organised serendipity

Another win for Delicious. I save everything in my account, to the point where I barely know what I've got any more. My 'to_read' list is ridiculously long and I've had clearing it out on my to-do list for months.

Anyway, I was saving yet another recipe in there, with my usual 'recipe' tag, when Delicious suggested the tag 'recipe-dairy-free'. Which made me wonder if I'd thought to save the wonderful dairy-free lemon cake recipe that I made last year and subsequently misplaced.

In an unusual stroke of far-mindedness I had done, and can now pass it on to the friend who appreciated it so much! Apparently even when I overload it, Delicious still comes through for me as having a better memory than I do.

Networking

As I think I said in Thing 9, Delicious Networks aren't really something I've explored very far. I did add the Law Library to my account though, and I had a skim through what my existing network had bookmarked recently. From what I can see, they're mostly looking for pretty pictures and knitting patterns. It could be worse.

I can definitely see the value of a Delicious network, kept in some kind of organised fashion, for a group of people who share interests. If I'm honest, I wouldn't add me to my network, unless I had an interest in randomness gathered on the internet. Actually, put like that, maybe my bookmarks are more entertaining than I think. Through my copious RSS feeds, I gather all kinds of random and interesting webpages. Like people who have a quotation or a song for every occasion, I usually have a webpage for every occasion, or I know where to get one (usually Lifehacker). It's been useful more than once, and I suppose it might be useful to others as well.

Generally though, I would think Delicious networks are best for shared interest groups, or for trusted sources or where you're sure the tagging is consistent. So if you need to stay up to date with Law, adding us to your network so you always know when the latest books on your subject come in is hugely valuable. It might even be a good way for students to share useful websites between themselves. If they're using other collaborative tools (eg Googledocs), it might be a good place to keep links to the various documents and articles for a project - you could just add the project tag and other members of the group could find it.

On the other hand, just adding people at random probably isn't such a good idea. Yes, this is going to be a recurring theme in this blog, but the principles of provenance and authority don't stop applying just because you're on the internet. If anything, with Web 2.0 tools, critical thinking and evaluation are even more important. Either that, or you just accept that you're going to pick up 90% rubbish (you should see some of the things in my GoogleReader), but it's worth it for that 10% gold.

Tag! You're it!

I've been intrigued to read people's reactions to Delicious, and thought I'd better write my own thoughts down before I go commenting on other people's blogs.

I am a huge, huge fan of Delicious and use it all the time. The first thing I do when I update my browser or get a new one (I've recently switched from Firefox to Chrome) is to install the Delicious extension, so that I can save bookmarks wherever I am. As mentioned in my photo post below, I move between computers all the time; today, I will be using the one at my desk, the one at the main enquiry desk, my netbook and probably the desktop at home as well. Trying to save bookmarks onto the computer is therefore completely pointless, as they'll be inaccessible to me when I move. By using Delicious, I've always got them, no matter where I'm working.

One of the big complaints I've seen about Delicious is the tagging, and I have to admit that I understand this one. I don't really use my Delicious Network at all (although maybe I should, since my friends always seem to know where to find the cool stuff), and it is frustrating when people have tagged badly or inconsistently. On the other hand, I know plenty of people who are paragons of virtue when it comes to tagging, and it's incredibly easy to find things on the subjects they're interested in.

The other complaint about Delicious has been volume. There is an enormous amount of information on Delicious, how can you possibly find what you want? In all honesty, that's the kind of question you could apply to the whole internet. We all know that it can be tricky to explain to students that not everything they need can be found through Google, or rather that there are quicker and easier ways of finding things. For me, Delicious is much like that. My personal network (different from my work one) consists of people I know and trust to find interesting things. If I'm looking for information, I start with the source that's most likely to know the answer, and that source is not often going to be Delicious. On the other hand, if I'm looking for something good to read, and someone in my network saves book reviews, that would be an excellent place to start. Yes, there are inconsistencies between tagging styles, but most people are internally consistent, and a glance at their tag list will generally show this up. I don't really regard it as any different to evaluating any other source of information:

~ Does this contain the kind of of information I want? If I'm looking for car advice and all the links I can see relate to penguins, then this may not be the place.
~ Is the tagging consistent? If it isn't, then it's going to take me so long to find what I want that I may as well try someone else.
~ What are the sources being linked to? You have to know what kind of information you want - do you want blogs or official websites or book recommendations for further reading.

These are basic questions that librarians don't even think about most of the time, yet it's a critical faculty that tends to fall by the wayside when we start looking at the internet. We look at the volume, the lack of editorial control, the inconsisten approach to structure and assume this means it's not going to be of use. But these are essentially different ways of disseminating information, and there's no need to approach them any differently to any other information source.

Delicious is just a tool for accessing information that other people found useful. If it doesn't suit the way you work, then there are good alternatives. Personally, I find it fascinating to see how other people have tagged information - sometimes that can be as interesting as the information itself! - and while I would never use it as a primary source of information, I can definitely see the value in looking at what other people found useful. As long as I'm still free to evaluate these things for myself, I can definitely see the value in people sharing resources. And cute pictures of cats, which seems to be most of what's on my network at the moment...

The look of the Thing

Things 7 and 8 were to do with photo editing, which isn't something I feel I have a particular knack for. I love photographs, but I take very bad ones, and I don't really have a good enough eye for colour/style to feel confident doing interesting things to my pictures. So I thought this 'Thing' was going to be fairly quick and simple. I already have a Flickr account, which I use for keeping pictures of my crocheting in, so that didn't need anything doing to it, and I figured I'd just prod at Picnik a little to see what it could do and leave it at that. My photos are already in sets, and although I can see the value of the map feature if you're taking pictures of exotic climes, it's not really much use for crochet! So I thought I'd be able to rattle through these Things in pretty short order.

As usual, I vastly underestimated how much time I can waste on the internet.

Ah, Google Reader, where would I be without you? As with other parts of 23 Things, I'm using my existing Google Reader for this, since it's already over-subscribed! The only trouble with it is that it's attached to a different online identity, but the screencap gives you an idea of how it's set up:

As you can see, I've got lots of folders there, and expanding just one of them will give you an idea why:

Thing 4 update

Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I clicked on every link in the sidebar at the 23 Things Blog. Yup, that's right, I looked at every single 23 Things blog at Oxford. It was an interesting experience.

Common themes included not having enough time 'for this blogging thing', that RSS readers take too much time to get through, or just plain not seeing the point of some 'Things' at all. There were also a few people deeply concerned about privacy issues, especially when it came to photographs.

It's raining...er...blogs

There are a lot of people taking part in 23 Things. No really, even more than that. I've barely had time to work my way through the 'a's and the 'w's (I tend to start at the top, realise that I always start at the top then skip to the bottom. I may never get to read anything beginning with 'm')

Trying to read them all will be impossible, but a quick sampling has proved interesting. It's striking how many very short entries there are, where people have just noted "this is my Thing" then moved on. Then there are some very long entries from people who have experience with blogs and are therefore willing to talk for longer.

Personally, I love blogs, although I find Blogger very un-instinctive after several years of using Livejournal. One of my big incentives for participating in 23 Things is to get the hang of Blogger better, as I'd like to have a personal/professional blog I can direct people to, rather than my personal/writing one. I find other people's lives fascinating, so I subscribe to lots of personal blogs as well as a few 'professional' ones. The one thing I don't do is subscribe to any 'news' blogs, since I have news feeds on my iGoogle page that I use to catch the headlines.

As with any piece of work, a blog is usually only as good as the amount of effort a person is willing to put into it. If you're willing to write regularly, interestingly and entertainingly, engage with your commenters and go out to comment on other people's posts, a blog can be a successful and lively place to be. If all you do is drop a one line post in every now and again, it's probably not going to be. I'd also say that the commenting is essential. The key with Web 2.0 technologies is engagement - if you're not prepared to go out into the wider blogosphere, you can't really expect people to come to you. And if you're not providing them with content when they do click the link, why would they come back? With all these programmes, you have to decide what you want to get out of it, and how much work you're prepared to do to make it happen.

Now, I'm off to do just that before I get even more philosophical about it...

Multiple Identity Disorder

After some thought, I decided to set up a completely new Google ID for the 23 Things programme, but not to set up a new blog. For one thing, Google gets awfully confused if you try to register too many IDs, and for another, I originally conceived this blog as a professional, rather than a personal, place. So I've ended up with a sort of odd mishmash, where I'm using some of the old and some of the new.

My iGoogle page ended up much the same way. I've got some old favourite gadgets on there, like the weather one, and the Google Reader one, and my header image is very much 'personal'. But since I'm exploring different things, I decided to add a few others that caught my eye, just to see if I'd actually use them. Weirdly, although I'm using Chrome, which you'd think would be perfect for using with iGoogle and gadgets, I've had considerable trouble getting some of them to show up on my home page. There's a fairly obscure library gadget that I thought I'd try out, but I can't get it to show up at all. Very odd.

As it is, this is what my new iGoogle page looks like:

It's come out a little smaller than I wanted, but hopefully you can see the various gadgets on there. I used my tried and tested method of creating pictures from screenshots, which is to copy the image into Powerpoint, crop and resize it so I like it, then 'save as' a JPEG file. It's not an ideal method but it can be an incredibly useful shortcut and saves having to use image editors (I'm not a fan of Paint, and GIMP seemed overkill for a screenshot!) I'm now wondering if there's a more direct way to control how Blogger posts images, so I'm off to wander through the Help menus and find out.

Actually getting started

As usual, I'm late to the party, but I'm finally getting going on the 23 Things programme properly. It's taken more rearranging of my online life than I'd expected, and I now need a chart to keep my personal, professional and online identities untangled. Although I've had this blog for a while, and although I feel I'm fairly confident with Web 2.0 applications, I'm hoping that 23 Things will help me consolidate what I've learned, as well as filling in the gaps in my knowledge.

With the web, as with most of the things I do, I'm largely self-taught. While this means I can wrestle with most programmes and force them to do what I want them to do, it also means that I'm missing out on some of the basics. I can play the piano (just) but because I could never be bothered with scales or music theory, I've never really got past the basics. I can manage basic HTML and CSS, but because I got confused halfway through, I never pursued it, and my husband writes far better websites than I do. Hopefully the structure of the 23Things programme means that I'll be forced to slow down and overcome my natural impatience - I usually want to have learned something, rather than actually learn it.

As I'm starting late, I probably won't go back and startle people by commenting on really old posts unless I know them personally. But it's going to be interesting to build a new Blog Roll (my personal RSS feed list is massively out of control), and to get to grips with some new things as well as revising the old properly

First Timers

I've decided to hijack my own blog, partly because creating a third one for yet another version of me seems a little ridiculous, and partly because it's not like I've been actively using it anyway. For about ten minutes, I seriously contemplated creating a third blog for the new content that I want to put in here. I have a blog for the things I'm a fan of. I have a Ravelry page for my crochet projects. And in theory, I have this blog for keeping notes about librarianship. But since the last thing I posted in here was an appeal for a dog adoption, I'm thinking that wasn't quite the roaring success I'd hoped for.

Two things have prodded me into action. The first is the 23 Things programme being run through OULS. Since I already have blogs, I assumed I wasn't eligible, but on my (very excellent) visit to OUP yesterday, I was persuaded otherwise, and once I untangle my various online pseuds, I'm going to register. This blog will be the home for that content. While much of what's on the 23 Things list I've already done, I have own list of things that I want to tackle, mostly involving making Blogger do what I want it to do, rather than prodding it and wishing I already knew how it worked without having to do anything.

The other is that we had an offer accepted on a flat this morning. Yup, this is our first house purchase and yup, it's utterly and completely terrifying. Not just for the amount of money involved, although that's considerable (and don't get me started on Stamp Duty). Mostly it's because of all the legalese involved. There are so many hoops to jump through that I'm starting to feel like a dog on an agility course, and I want to keep a record of things. So expect the content to range from the size of solicitor's fees (considerable) to the excitement of buying a new toilet (so many to choose from!)

It's funny going into one thing where I already feel like an old hand, and another where I am a complete and utter newbie. Hang on to your hats, guys. It's going to be a bumpy ride