Give me a little more time...

Well it's pretty obvious that I'm quite a long way behind on this whole cpd23 thing. Thing 11 has just been posted, and I'm only just beginning to start thinking about Thing 3 (having postponed for a while Thing 2).

This week in the library we are taking the opportunity to do our annual stock audit, which involved scanning the barcodes of every item on the library shelves. "What fun!" I hear you cry! Well, actually, it beats sitting around waiting for a library user to ask you to share your pearls of wisdom with them, and after we've sifted through the reports and fixed any catalogue errors, we'll have a better representation of what's on our shelves than we had before.

So I may not have time to post anything on Thing 3 - Consider your personal brand until later in the week. I hope my tardiness is matched by other participants. Based on my experience of other people's blogs over the past couple of weeks, this may indeed be the case.

Things to do...

So, the trawl is done, but I don't really have any comments to make. I know that this whole "experience other people's blogs" thing is designed to get us to comment on what others have written, and therefore to get more involved with the blog community, but I think I'll just stay a "lurker" for now.
Actually, I don't really like the term "lurker" - it has very negative connotations and makes me sound like I'm standing in an alleyway wearing a dirty mac.
There's nothing wrong with reading other bloggers' content and not commenting. Surely the use of a pejorative term such as "lurker" discourages new bloggers?

Thing 2

Woah! Too many blogs, too little time! After solving, via a roundabout route, the issues referred to in earlier posts, I've now started to make my way through some blogs, trying to decide which of them I'd like to read more of.

There are now over 700 people taking part in cpd23. There's no way I'm going to be able to read everyone's so a search strategy was required. By "search", I mean "filter", by "strategy", I mean "use delicious tags to only show a certain number of blogs". Very scientific.

Anyway, I managed to get the big list down to a slightly more manageable list of 176 UK HE library people. Lots of people here similar to me, some familiar names.

I'm following a selection of blogs now, chosen for the following reasons:

• I like their writing style




• They are familiar to me in some way (I follow on Twitter, have worked with them)




• They are from, or work in, my locality




• They relate their blog thoughts to more than one subject (using cross-referencing/analogies/metaphor/their own interests)




• Their lives sound more interesting than my own!

I deliberately excluded blogs which had no posts, or only a few, which looked as if the author had given up early. I may be completely wrong: I myself have been very lax on the blogging front recently (can I blame being on holiday for this?).

So all I have to do now is read properly the blogs I have subscribed to, and write something about them!

Perhaps I'll leave that to tomorrow...

23 things - up and running

Well, the reason I haven't done any of the "23 things" is because we've been having trouble with the blog at work. A not very speedy internet connection and a blog which has all its content (including images and widgets) on one page means that every time I try to access it my browser stops responding.

Perhaps a redesign of the blog to limit the number of posts on a page might rectify this problem.

In the meantime, I shall be trying to follow everything via the very handy RSS feed, http://cpd23.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default, and try to catch up over the next couple of weeks.

23 things

23 things for professional development should be something that I can do at work, however, our network conncection is so flaky and our browser so out of date that unfortunately the blog keeps crashing every time I try to access it.

So I am attempting to post via email in the meantime, although not being able to access the blog kind of restricts my ability to do thing 3: look at other people's blogs! If this were twitter I'd say #epicfail

Anyway, blogs are a great way of posting your thoughts on anything and everything, but not great if, like me, you're quite forgetful, or don't really have a lot to communicate.

At least twitter limits your characters so there's less pressure to write something interesting!

When I have access to the blog again I'm hoping to set up a feed so that everything comes to my inbox. Hang on, isn't that one of the future things..?