Thing 4: Twitter, RSS and Storify

Twitter Bird Sketch by Shawn Campbell on Flickr, used under CC licence - ta!

I've been on Twitter for some time now as @rscsam. My moniker (there's a word I don't use very often) is related to my old job which isn't ideal but I can't get my head around changing it. I have a separate personal account - which I rarely use - dating again from my previous job when we were told not to say anything political during the general election as we were on government pay. That proved too hard to bear! I keep my personal account as it has a separate non-work-related bunch of stuff that I follow - local news & councils, music stuff, friends and family. My work account is an invaluable source of library-related information, ideas, news and trivia. I do use it more for listening than tweeting and I think I ought to make more effort to have a conversation now and again. I've watched and learned from How Not to Tweet! I've never used Storify, because I've never had a reason too yet, but I'm sure it's a great tool. I'm going to keep an eye out for a reason to use it...

Now I hate to gripe...but I'm going to anyway! I do struggle with the whole tweeting from conferences thing sometimes. Your feed gets swamped for the duration (although there are clever tools to weed out hashtags e.g. some mentioned here) and often it can be all soundbites with no substance. I want stuff I can USE. When people tweet links or examples of people / places doing something interesting that you can follow up then that's superb. My other pet peeve is paper.li : usually random stuff in an irritating format. I'm sure it's great in the right hands but it's just not for me.

For current awareness, I'm finding there's a real tussle going on for me between RSS and Twitter. A lot of stuff comes through on Twitter and then I find it duplicated in my RSS feeds. However, particularly being part-time, I just can't keep up with Twitter enough to rely on not having missed something vital. I use Google Reader and have a set of folders dividing up my work feeds (library blogs, Welsh library stuff, subject-support related stuff, information literacy stuff, learning technology etc.) and my personal ones (news, art blogs, music blogs, pretty pictures on Flickr, archaeology feeds, vegan recipes, green stuff). I manage my feeds quite closely and get rid of one if I find too many posts just aren't interesting me. I think you have to be ruthless or it becomes unmanageable.

My best RSS feeds?
For work, the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog has been going great guns lately on academic research-related stuff. Personally, I always enjoy the feisty Heritage Action blog for the latest on heritage issues - there's an ongoing investigation into the trashing of a prehistoric stone row by a wind farm on Mynedd y Betws which is almost visible from my front room on a good day (I don't mind wind farms but I do like stones). Epic Fail! and the gentler Win! used to have me howling with laughter but I couldn't keep up so they've been axed!