Twitter & Tags

The end of the week is approaching fast, and as I'm not in the office tomorrow, I thought I'd better do a quick blog about Thing 8 - tagging and also add a little more about Thing 7 - Twitter. I'm only half-way through the article which we were asked to read about tagging, but have had a quick whizz through my posts and put in some more tags. As my posts have pretty much stuck to the 23 Things without much rumination, I think I can manage with the basics of which Thing I was blogging about and which number it actually is. As it is part of Cam 23 I wasn't sure whether or not to put Cam 23 as a tag on each entry or not, and unless someone tells me it is a good idea, I don't think I'll bother unless I've particularly mentioned it.

Obviously, I can see the sense in adding tags in order to be able to quickly jump back and reference what I have said in the past or for others to get a general idea of what's covered in the blog. It's definitely easier to do as you go along.

Twitter is still pretty difficult to get into. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I'm not a librarian so I can't get involved in the library discussions and apart from Cam 23 I don't have much else to comment on to people I don't know. It seems to me that others are finding it a similar experience as after the first couple of days of the week, Twitter seems to have been a lot quieter (or maybe I'm just getting used to it?).

I'm using JournoTwit on my desktop and Seesmic on my iTouch to make accessing Twitter a bit more user friendly. They have definitely helped. I prefer Seesmic because it lists peoples replies to me in a separate tab under the name Replies, so I can't miss them! I didn't have a clue that there were any replies to me there until then. In general, both do make things a lot more manageable than just one long stream of tweets, but I do find that I still need to go into Twitter itself to manage my account and look for people to follow. It may be possible to do this on the applications, but I haven't figured out how yet. I also find it difficult to stick to the 140 character limit. Not having enough experience, I don't know if saying one thing over several posts is workable, so I've had to edit down what I've been saying, which is a drag.

We have discussed, in the research unit, the possibilities of blogging, Facebooking and Twittering as a way of promoting our work to go along side our website and newsletter. It seems that it might be something we try in the future, but don't have the resources to make it happen right now. I'm hoping that when we do move in this direction that the things I've learned whilst taking part in Cam 23 will be useful then.