A social lunch

  by  fotobydave 

The Cambridge Libraries Brown Bag/networking/journal discussion lunch on 4 April will be at the Faculty of Classics.  Inspired by Andy Priestner's Twitter for Research session, which he has summarised in his blog, I have chosen an article on Social Media and set up a little survey to gauge your twitter usage. 

The article for discussion is:

Nicholas, David, et al. "Social Media, Academic Research and the Role of University Libraries", The Journal of Academic Librarianship, v.37, no. 5, 373-375 available via ScienceDirect. 

If you would like to read more the first reference in the article is an interesting CIBER report on social media impact on research.

As a little added extra for those of you on twitter I have put together a form where you can analyse the contents of your tweets.  I have given options for recording them for one day, one week or having a guesstimate or just summarising what you do if you don't have time to check all your tweets.  I have followed some of the headings devised by G. Veletsianos in his research project on twitter usage by academics in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning.

I thought it might be interesting to summarise the results at the lunch and get the debate started.  Even if you can't come to the lunch do please fill in the form - remembering that this is for fun so don't agonise over the questions!

  by  Jeffrey Beall 

Finally the venue details : the lunch will be in room 1.11 at the Faculty of Classics.  Room available from 1.00, bring your lunch, and discussion starts at 1.15 finishing at 2.00.   Will try to live-tweet using #cambbl for those who can't make it but would still like to join in.

Hope to see some of you there.

Extra Thing 2 : More (t)wittering

I have to admit to a bit of a love/hate relationship with twitter - or more a love/apathy relationship.  For cam23 last year I joined twitter as instructed.  I followed people but found it difficult to keep track of everything.  Someone recommended giving tweetdeck a try and I installed it on my computer and found the whole experience much better.  I could create boxes for my saved searches, lists and fav people.  I was becoming addicted.  Then I changed computers and tweetdeck was gone.  I drifted for awhile back on twitter before losing interest. I found it useful if I couldn't go to a conference to follow some of the tweets, although often they mean nothing unless you are there as too brief to properly portray what is going on.   

I then gave hootsuite a try as you can access that anywhere via a browser but I didn't like it as much as tweetdeck.  It was slow to refresh and I couldn't seem to link in other social sites, such as Facebook, unless I wanted all my twitter posts to go to my facebook profile - which I didn't.  Now 23thinging again and accessing twitter.  I now have new pc and have installed tweetdeck (now part of twitter) and really liking it. I get a little box popup when there is a new tweet which is useful to keep up-to-date with something I am following or amazingly distracting when trying to work on other things! They are also working on a web interface so I would be able to access it elsewhere (which would be good now as not on my own PC).

I suppose I ought to start tweeting again about #cam23 or at least checking out the other tweets.

I had been a twit, now I'm not

Thanks to a comment from Girl in the moon on my blog about a blog made by Npage in response to a blog by Miss Crail on her hatred of twitter, I am not starting to feel better about it (even if I seem to be approaching a six degrees of Kevin Bacon moment with all these links!)  I have given JournoTwit a go and I like it.  I created a column for #cam23 and you can do as many as you want with different tags or keyword searches.  It also gives you some to start with as seen below:

Slightly worrying moment when I thought I had sent all cam23ers to the rubbish bin of twitter.  I marked my column of #cam23 tweets as read and the whole lot vanished.  Not to worry I found a tab lurking at the top and got it back again.

In a very shallow moment I prefer the look of it to twitter - suits my tidy mind with neat columns,  and finally I could see at a glance the responses to tweets I had sent.  I am not sure I am ready for a complete love affair with twitter but I am going to try some relate counselling via JournoTwit and see how I get on.

Thanks to the other bloggers for the information.

I thawt I taw a putty tat - then it was gone

Thing 7, time for tweeting.  I felt I needed to try it out for awhile before I could really blog about it.  Still not convinced on its usefulness.  I think it is probably great if you are connected almost constantly to your twitter page and can see all the updates for the people you follow.  But if you only drop in now and again (or even just daily) it is pot-luck as to what you happen to see.

I am following various people but when I login I just get the last 10 or so tweets, sometimes all from the same people if they have been tweeting alot.  I probably need to investigate further and try other options for viewing tweets.  I have the #cam23 search so I can check out what is going on in there - although again only the latest ones unless I plough back through pages of old tweets.  If you reply to someone or ask a question how do you see if you get a reply?  Maybe I am missing something but unless I happen to be logged in when it pops up on my home page or if I replied to someone and go and check out their page I can't see responses.

I tried out "seesmic web" suggested in the 23 things blog to see if that helped but still couldn't see a way to sort my tweets.  Realise again this is the organisational side of my nature and sometimes I like the serendipitious (is that a word?) nature of logging in and seeing something that catches myr eye of interest or fun, but for more serious benefits I would like to be able to divide up my tweets, e.g. library related, friends, entertainment etc.

Anyway here is my twitter page and I did manage to change the background for no particular reason!

Should also add the one thing I do like about twitter (which I didn't think I would say) is having updates for conferences/meetings of interest that I couldn't get to.  When I am at them it has always annoyed me that people look like they are on their phone texting and not paying attention but now I will think they are twittering and passing on the useful information to people who can't be there. 

So I will take the one positive and try to develop from that and maybe if I didn't have such an antiquated phone and could check twitter on it I might become addicted.