Fresh out of Diigo puns

There is now a worldwide shortage of unused Diigo puns, so I won't even try...

I've used Delicious / del.icio.us / deli.ciou.s or whatever silly configuration they're using at the moment, and have been perfectly happy. Assuming that Yahoo don't sell the product on to a mega-corporation who will only grant access via a package which forces me to watch Jeremy Clarkson and listen to TalkSport with Kelvin Mackenzie, Andy Gray, Richard Keys and other heroes of the enlightenment, Diigo was going to have to offer something special to tempt me away. And to be honest, refusing to respond to my request for an account purely because I have a Warwick email address immediately put me off.

I persevered and used my personal RichardBransonislovelyreally.net account, and since I'm a techno-idiot went to the help video on the Diigo welcome page. Wow - how much information can they throw at you in a shortish clip? A lesson for us there as we go video-crazy. I quickly lost the will to live, so just dabbled.

Verdict? Virtual post-it notes don't really do it for me, so I can't see that I'll be moving away from Delirious unless forced to.

  by  staminaplus100 

Reflection time

Reflection time.

I've been lucky so far in that I've been already reasonably well-versed in Things 1-12. Challenges to come, I think, in future weeks.

As you'll be able to tell from the brevity of this post, my main problem is that I don't have nearly as much time to devote to following up as I'd like. I'm sure I'm not using RSS or Twitter as smartly as I could, and hoped to use 23 Things to push me to explore more. but no time. And I still haven't got over the nagging suspicion that Twitter, Facebook, RSS et al are creating an extra flow of stuff coming at me. Much of it is interesting, but where does the extra time come from? Maybe ignorance is still bliss.

Pearls of wisdom?

I've been on Twitter for a while, and follow an odd mixture of library people, arts organisations and comedians. The Twitter god must be very confused trying to profile me...I see the value of having a network of people who may spot and alert me to interesting stuff, but I do question the Twitter diarrhoea of some people who can't wait to update the world about their every move. Thankfully not bowel movements. Unless I'm following the wrong people. Why do they think anybody is interested?

I set up a Facebook account a few years ago to lurk and see if students were dissing the Library, so we could respond. I found the delightful groups "I hate the Library and its various staff members" and "The Fat Woman in the Coffee Bar Puts Me Off My Food". I'm not sure my desire to use Facebook actively ever really recovered from this appalling stuff. As an old codger I find Facebook protocol rather mystifying: some students will ask to be my Facebook friend minutes after I've run a training session for a group.

As others have said, these are just channels of communication, so I'm happy with the idea of throwing stuff out there to see what sticks.

Fox on the run

At the risk of turning into Mr Me Too, I've also been the recipient of a Doodle poll, so the pressure of the 23 Things project has pushed me into doing what I should have done before - use Doodle. So I mailed another participant to set up an entirely fictitious meeting. This could be the start of a beautiful friendship. Slight irritation that in order to use Doodle I'm pulled yet further into the embrace of Google. A bit like having to have a Yahoo account to use Delicious...

I've also previously been called into meetings by others using Outlook to schedule time based on individual calendars, although this of course does rather rely on people keeping theirs up to date. Cough.

So to Firefox. I've been asking myself why I've stayed loyal to IE. Inertia? Annoyance that Answer no.2 from IT people (after No.1 Have you tried switching it off and on again?) has become "Have you tried it with Firefox?" Minor irritations with Firefox like needing an extra click to change a small part of the page URL? 

Just recently a couple of things in IE are starting to irritate me: locally, I can't seem to set my preferred homepage (the option is greyed out) so I'm stuck with the University homepage (is this Big Brother?). Firefox is allowing me to use whatever I want. Then yesterday IE decided (apparently unilaterally) to change font and font size on some websites, especially Google. Not that I use that much  :) Is this nature's way of telling me to migrate? Since I have tried switching it off and on again, I clearly need to move to Step 2, so I'm giving Firefox a go. I just migrated my favourites to the Fox (incidentally this made me notice how many of them are very far from favourites, so a weeding exercise is well overdue here).



Is that Michael McIntyre on guitar???

Knowing my RSS from my EEBO (shameless steal) - Things 4-6

As others have said, it's nice to have already done my homework for the week. Jess introduced me to iGoogle a couple of years ago, and I enthusiastically added gadgets (widgets?) to my dashboard: BBC news, local weather, Google maps, Charlotte Brown's Library catalogue search etc. I find that I now only tend to use a couple of them: a feed from Twitter, and my Google Reader pulling together my RSS feeds. Like others, I experimented with other readers, but settled on Google as the most stable. I haven't gone the whole hog, though, and made iGoogle my home page - I'm still loyal to the University...

Interesting that the University has reinvented the wheel with start.warwick, where I can access local information, such as locating a room on campus or the amount left on my Eating at Warwick card. But it's a faff to access two dashboards.

RSS feeds are great for pulling everything into one place, but the constant flow can seem rather overwhelming at times Don't you occasionally wish that it would all stop?

There should probably be a still from an appropriate film at this point, but the Disney Corporation might sue me, so you'll have to make do with

Why am I here?

I should confess that I'm already a user of many of the elements of the 23 Things programme, so am mainly interested in exploring some of the others. Obviously if you've never Doodled you haven't lived...

My blogging experience so far has revolved around targeting information at students (and staff) on specific courses, with mixed results. The students like the information, but seem to prefer to receive it either via email or to the Facebook group they use, so the blog ends up more as a dynamic archive. Not necessarily a bad thing...

Reservations? I have a few.

Am I just adding to the increasing noise out there?  Does the world need me to contribute another pile of words? Am I just talking to like-minded people? Am I going to write another sentence starting with the word "Am"?

Looking at some blog entries (and tweets) I often wonder why people think anybody cares what they are eating, whereabouts on a train they are sitting or what they did today. Maybe it's a generational thing, and I'm simply too old to want to share my every thought with the world.  As the song goes,

You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything.

Logically I should shut up at this point. So I will.