DIY Librarian

As John Dupuis said, “the Twittermonster has claimed another victim.”

I once said I’d never join Facebook. Now I pause during my day and think, “That thought would make an excellent Facebook status update.”

I said I didn’t see the point of Twitter. If Facebook is too much information, surely Twitter is way too much information.

However, I am starting to see the point of Twitter in some situations. For example, I’ve followed the conference Twitter feeds at SLA conferences and gotten lots of good information–like where to go for a quick lunch, and which speakers are really good.

So, when the chair-elect of SLA’s Social Science Division said she was going to post Twitter updates from the upcoming Leadership Summit, I decided to try creating an account for myself so I could help her put the Twitter feed up on the division’s web site.

Naturally, I announced this momentous occasion on Facebook, and promptly picked up a follower on Twitter. So, now I am twittering. And, I suppose, ascending the Twitter Life Cycle curve.

At the SLA conference in Seattle, I got talked into signing up for SLA’s 23 Things. While I don’t consider myself on the forefront of Web 2.0 (I’m convinced that once I found Facebook, it instantly became yesterday’s news), I’m pretty comfortable with a good number of the tools (my library has been blogging for over 2 years now and this humble blog has been around in some form since 2003) and I’m not afraid to try new ones out. I thought 23 Things might get me out of my comfort zone and get me to try some new things – plus the organizers were pretty persuasive.

I haven’t blogged about the first few things (blogs and wikis), mainly because I was so familiar with them. I have more blogs than I can handle already, and I started using a wiki for SLA Social Science Division program planning last year. (This year I’ve invited more people to use the wiki, and am happy to see most of them at least reading the wiki and a good number contributing to it.)

Now we are on to tagging, which I’m not quite as comfortable with. Oh, sure, I tag things, but I’m never quite sure about it. Is this the right tag? Will I ever find this again?

Mostly I am good at coming up with my own special tags. For example, I tag books in Library Thing with currentreading and use that to display them on my blog. I tag posts on del.icio.us with staffpop and plug that feed into my intranet site for my staff. But actual meaningful tags? I’m a little behind on that.

Next up: Folksonomies and Technorati, where the current top story is “Dick Busted on Sex Charges Outside Chicken Joint”. You can’t make this stuff up.