The Bubbly Librarian

My daughter has been scolding me for failing to update my blog.  I’ve been busy building my Moodle site, which has its own blog and wiki features and isn’t blocked at school.  Blogging is definitely going to slow down as school begins.

Thing # 10 in SLJ’s All Together Now was Twitter.  I set up my Twitter account back in January but I haven’t done a lot with it.  I got my brother to sign up with me, but he didn’t last long.  He quit after a couple of months because he couldn’t see the point. I follow some library and educational tech folks that I admire, as well as my sister and a couple of friends.  I thought maybe, with it being one of the SLJ “things” that I might have an ah-ha moment and finally get the hoopla.  So far, not so much. My Twitter name is msmolly27, in case you want to follow my oh-so-exciting life.

Yes, it is sort of cool to check in and see that my sister must be trying a new recipe and is wondering if she really has to follow the cooling directions.  It’s fun to notice that someone else is doing the same thing I am at the same time. It is cool that I can follow Barack Obama, but it would be cooler if HE was doing the update and included the mundane stuff. 

I do find useful links through Twitter occasionally, but I wonder how many I miss. I don’t click on many of the posted links because they are not typically accompanied by a lot of descriptive information. That’s the downside of the 140 character limit.

I discovered Tweet What You Eat, which is exactly what it sounds like, a place to post what you eat when you eat it.  The point, I think, is to keep you from downing a whole bag of Hershey’s Miniature candy bars in one day, because it would be embarrassing to post that for all the world to see. But that assumes total honesty.  I do follow and post TWYE, but if you think I really Tweet everything I eat,  you don’t know me very well.

Most importantly, Twitter is blocked at school, which means that by the time I get online, I’ll be hours behind everyone’s updates. The reality is that, even with the ability to send and receive updates with my cell phone, my day to day use of Twitter is not likely to continue after September 1.

Will Richardson wrote a provocative post about Twitter on his blog.  If you are at all interested in Twitter, I highly recommending reading his post as well as the ensuing comments.