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

This week’s thing is about keep current using a few different online tools: Twitter, RSS and Pushnote. Let’s just say upfront that I’m a big user of Twitter and have what some might consider an intimate knowledge of RSS. Pushnote however was new to me. So, let me talk about each of them a bit.

twitter-logoTwitter is a tool I use daily. In most cases what I post is links to articles that I find online and that I think will be of interest to my followers. That’s not to say that I don’t participate in the odd funny meme or two when I get a chance. This blog feeds into my Twitter account along with items I Digg, YouTube videos I favorite, and RSS items I share in Google Reader. From my POV, Twitter is like the central drop point for nearly everything I do on the Social Web. I currently follow 406 other Twitter users and don’t add someone all to often as I’m not sure I could handle many more. To do so, I use tools like Twitter’s lists and Seesmic to organize all the incoming information. I also treat Twitter like a real-time live conversation. If I’m not online I’m not participating. I don’t go back in the morning and see what I missed overnight. If it was important enough, someone will mention it while I’m around.

rss_logo2Maybe more important than Twitter is my Google Reader account. Here I subscribe to more than 850 feeds. Some post new information constantly, some hardly ever, most somewhere in the middle. I try to keep up with scanning all of it on a daily (if not nearly constant) basis but I’m not afraid to go away for a few days and then “mark all as read” when I get back. Like Twitter, if I miss something important, it’ll come across my radar soon enough.

89149v2-max-250x250Pushnote on the other hand was completely new to me. I signed up and installed the plugin on Monday and as of today, Friday, I’ve not seen that little star light up indicating content to read even once. Even when I signed up, none of my Twitter friends (I couldn’t get the Facebook connectivity to work) had Pushnote accounts. I do see the usefulness of this but I’ve tried similar services in the past and none of them have stuck with me. As with all social services, you need a certain critical mass of known people to make them work for you. Maybe this is one that’s more popular in the UK than here in the US.

Published by

Michael Sauers

Michael Sauers is currently the Technology Innovation Librarian for the Nebraska Library Commission in Lincoln, Nebraska and has been training librarians in technology for more than 15 years. He has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller. He earned his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael’s twelfth book, Google Search Secrets (w/ Christa Burns) was published October 2013 and has two more books on the way. He has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs Web sites for authors and historical societies, takes many, many photos, and reads more than 100 books a year.

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