Thing 13: Reflecting on Things 1-12

So we're halfway through the 23 Things and it's Reflection Week. Here are my thoughts:

Things 1-3 (Publishing on the web)

This was easy and fun: creating this blog, writing my first post and exploring other Sot23 Things blogs. I like writing posts and it has been interesting, although sometimes frustrating, to see how the Blogger functionality varies between the web version accessed on a computer, the web version accessed on an iPad, and the iPad app. It's also interesting to read the views of my colleagues in their blog posts and I am delighted to have recently found out who LundintheLibrary is! It's a shame it isn't easier to post comments on a Wordpress blog without having a Wordpress account, it means I can only comment on other Sot 23ers who have a Blogger blog.

Things 4-6 (Keeping up to date)

These Things involved Netvibes and RSS feeds. Again, interesting to explore but Netvibes isn't for me at the moment (although I might use it for work in the future) and although I can see why some people may like RSS feeds I prefer to receive email alerts or use my newly discovered liking of Twitter to gather information.

Things 7-9 (Time management)

This was useful in that I had no idea that free online meeting schedulers (is that a word?) such as Doodle existed...but although I like the concept I will continue to use good old fashioned emailing or checking Outlook calendars to arrange work meetings, and phone/email/text/Facebook to arrange social meetings. Doodle worked well to arrange fake meetings for the purposes of the 23 Things, and probably if I used it frequently I would grow to love it but at the moment it seems an extra step that creates rather than reduces effort; you have to use email to send the Doodle link and I think I would prefer to list the possible times/dates in an email and ask people to reply directly. I admit to not having to arrange meetings with huge numbers of people though so Doodle wasn't really relevant to me.

Thing 9 was installing Firefox and Chrome and exploring the differences between the browsers. As with several of the Things this took much longer than an hour and I still only scratched the surface. I am surprised that the University does not provide our work computers with the most up to date version of each browser but using Chrome and IE for different tasks works for me, and I'm still not over my irrational dislike of Firefox.

Things 10-12 (Networking)

My perception and use of Twitter has changed as a direct result of the 23 Things. Previously I'd thought #whybother but now I see how it can be useful for keeping up to date with local news and a valuable tool for searching by subject for current information. I am firmly a follower rather than a tweeter though.

My views on Facebook haven't changed; it's great for communicating with friends and family and can be a useful source of information and is an additional way for businesses to attempt to connect with their users. I stand by my view of library Facebook pages, expressed in this previous post.

Investigating LinkedIn was Thing 12 - not a tool I need to use at the moment but interesting to see how many people use it, and the varying amount of effort they put into their profiles.


That brings us up to now. My only general reflection relates to the sheer amount of time it takes to explore each Thing in order to have more than a superficial opinion about it, much more than 1 hour a week. Bring on the next Thing!