Managing Management

More and more my work is being dominate by events.  Unlike a regular activity on a weekly or fortnightly basis, management and customers are demanding bigger spectacles where large number of can participate.  I can see a  place for application like the ones below to help co-ordinate these events in the future.

Doodle was really just a scheduling application much like in Outlook.  Outlook is used extensively at work so though Doodle is a cute program I can't see us moving to it in the future.  Here is my scheduled meeting,   Christmas Day.

Google Calendar suffers the same problem as Doodle where many of the things it can do are already done within the Outlook program.  I actually see more potential for myself co-ordinating meetings outside of work.  I will keep both Doodle and Google Calendar in mind next time I have to try and get a group of people together.

Eventbrite was a more unique program that allowed you to create tickets and even take payments for events.  Though I didn't play with the payment option, I did create an event, for which the website is here.  It was easy to use and as you can see, modify for a more corporate look.  Again, I don't know if we could use it at work with security issues always the main priority, but it is good to know it's there.

Oh boy! RSS again!

From last year I had this post, and this post and finally this post on RSS.  I just didn't get them for a long time, they didn't seem to speak my language and early on we didn't seem to want to be at the same places. But I've lived companionably with GoogleReader for 21 months now and we're still going strong.  I don't see a separation looming anytime soon.


So not love at first sight unlike many of the applications, but I now read it everyday and add and take out links as I need.  If I haven't seen anything I'm interested in reading on a blog for a while I unsubscribe and clear the clutter.  If I wish to search for a specific topic through all my feeds, GoogleReader has a search option at the top of the screen.  Though not as convenient as a rinse like Feed Rinse I don't usually look for any one thing and like the scan the news and library blogs for things of interest.

I can't say I organise my feeds, I don't have that many: a news feed, a few funny blogs, friends blogs, blogs relating library learning and a few other work related ones.  There would be less than 20 feeds and they don't all post everyday.  For the blogs that do post more than once a day, I scan the headings for something that interests me and mark the rest as read hiding them from my screen.

I set up a Feed Rinse for ABC new: Just In blog asking for any posts on cats and dogs. And did get a post on Pandas being genetically similar to dogs, I also receive a post on a helicopter crash that I couldn't see my search terms in.  Not a great success, I could have done that with a scan of the headlines.

FiltermyRSS had no more success in finding articles with dogs in them, and didn't have the convenience of being delivered to my reader. 

Tabloid was cute.  Creating a pdf of the current posts from whatever blog you stick in.  Not sure how I can share it besides just sending it as an attachment to an email.  Mind you it does make a very presentable version of the post which could be handing for making a printout for someone.  Cute, but really useful?
Google alerts, did that and talked about it here.  I've had to remove them already as the one on my suburb was just too depressing.

 I can see a need for such filters to find quality information on subjects and don't want to be wading through posts.  In saying that many posts are already on a particular subject and these filters are not very refined searches.  I'd be pretty disapppointed with any searchengine I was using that came back with the results I've seen here.  In the end, I'm glad people are thinking about these sorts of things and making them available, but me and my RSS are doing just fine thank, just the way we are.

Twittering about Twitter

I must remember #nswlearning2.1...I must remember #nswlearning2.1...I must remember #nswlearning2.1...

I've tried...I really have.  I've had the account for a few months and besides the creative mind puzzle of trying to fit what I want to say elloquently  into 140 characters I haven't had use for it personally.

And I suspect that lots of people feel the same.

Having looked at a few tweets I'm seeing a general pattern of simple tweeted and added value tweets.  Let me explain

  Simple tweets are just a statement just thrown out into space to be accepted by the cosmos as it sees fit, for example:

stephenfry: A warm and sunny day. Highly cheering.

Ground breaking stuff.  In the library world this would be equilivant example:

BCLIS:  Summer Reading Club starts Monday 16 November. 

Useful and dull.  It doesn't tell you what Summer Reading Club is or contain a link to where to find the branches participating.

On the whole, most organisational tweets I read are more your value added than those above.  The tweet you have when the 140 character just aren't enough:

TheBritishLibrary:  Points of View on C4 News tonight http://bit.ly/pointsofview Free - come and see it

This tweet includes a link to another site which provides more information.  Which means that this group have found the can not communicate as they would have liked  in Twitter so they need to put what they want to say somewhere else and link to Twitter.  Twitter ceases to be communication itself, but a link from your readers to your communication.

It's just not enough

And that's the problem for me with Twitter, it's just not enough.  I can only express myself in a tiny space (all of which I can do on my macro-blog site if I so wish) and requires me to be fluent in game-speak to make any real sense of others' communications. I can't just write a simple tag into a Labels box to help find my post, I have to add # marks after my statement and make it look...messy.

I'd love to think that people will follow their library Twitter and find the tweets interesting and useful.  I'd love to think I can catch people in the nick of time to let them know about an event that's starting, or closing or that I think could be really popular.  Prove me wrong.

And just as I'm about to publish this post I read this tweet:

wilw:   One of my neighbors is having a pine tree cut down. The whole street smells like Christmas.

Maybe it's not so bad.

Library learning 2.1: here we go again!

This was such a great course last year that when I saw it was on again I jumped on this old blog and revamped the look.

Minimalist I know, but it does mean I have twice as much room for commenting on all the new apps that have found there way onto the Internet.

I do like how much you can now edit to suit your own tastes including the look of your Nav bar...like, only you'll be looking at it, but there's an option to change it to suit your current layout.

I didn't try one of the after market templates as I didn't think I could do that on the work machines, but I can see that having the ability to use templates made elsewhere, out choice of looks explodes into almost infinite possiblities.  Surely there would be one to suit any organisation's corporate image.

So Library learning 2.1...here we go!