CPD23 – Thing 4: Current awareness – Twitter, RSS, and Pushnote

The irony of writing this post on current awareness 3 weeks after this ‘thing’ was added to the 23 things blog is not lost on me. It seems I have some catching up to do! Of the three current awareness tools to explore for this thing, Pushnote was the one I’d not already used or even heard of. I was originally intending to try this out but after reading a few tweets from others who’d tried it and were not impressed decided to give it a miss, especially as I only have access to Internet Explorer at work. So I’m cheating a bit and just blogging about the things I already use. Well, if it ain’t broke…

I first started using Twitter about 18 months ago and didn’t really ‘get it’ at first but after I stopped following Stephen Fry and found a few librarians to follow (via their blogs) I was able to start building up a bit of a network. I’m still not particularly good at Twitter, and still feel like a newbie. I often end up not sharing or retweeting links as I tend to assume that everyone who follows me probably has already seen it if they follow the same people I do. I have to say though that Twitter can be the thief of time if you try to read every tweet in your twitter feed! I’m definitely more productive when I’m not trying to ‘keep up’ with Twitter.

RSS feeds are also really useful to me as I like to ensure I keep my knowledge up to date and find out about developments within the profession. However, I realise I sometimes need to manage some of this information better so I don’t feel as though I’m missing something because I can’t read every single post in my feedreader. This was emphasised recently after returning from a couple of weeks away to well over a 100 unread items in Google Reader! Woodsiegirl’s post for this ‘thing’ therefore caught my eye, titled ‘Current Awareness, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the “Mark All As Read” Button’ it articulated exactly what I’d been thinking while desperately trying to ‘catch up’. There is a balance to be found in trying to maintain current awareness whilst avoiding information overload.

As current awareness tools, Twitter and RSS feeds complement each other really well. Now I’ve found a few blogs and journals I like to read regularly, it’s great to view new posts and articles all in one place in Google Reader. Twitter provides me with a more serendipitous approach to finding new information and is how I find out about new blogs and interesting articles I might not have discovered otherwise.