Thing 10 - Evernote, virtually a notebook

I've just spent an hour installing Evernote, reading the simple "Getting started guide", watching several helpful tuition videos, and then having a play around with the application. My first impressions are that I really like it and I think I will use it a lot for various research projects I have on the go. Being able to save web content is the main draw for me, and is something that I have, before now, been doing very inefficiently and precariously. My web browser favourites folders contain a lot of addresses saved because I wanted to archive particular content on a particular page for future reference. Saving the address is not a sensible way of archiving the content, because once the page is taken down or moved, you've lost that content forever. With Evernote, even after the page disappears, you get to keep the content. This is great! It's only taken me a few minutes to create a notebook and clip into it several web pages and screenshots that mention/show my grandad (George Hunter), whose career as a jazz musician in the 1940s, 50s and 60s I've been trying to piece together over the last few years. Fans of Ted Heath, Jack Parnell and other pioneers of big band are few and far between nowadays, so I'm glad to have archived this content before these websites disappear.

I like the way you can tag content, create multiple folders, search, make notes - generally engage in all those satisfying activities that made me want to be a librarian in the first place (organise, analyse, classify, catalogue etc.)! Another great feature is that you can save tweets to Evernote. Lots of useful pieces of information and links are disseminated via Twitter, so it's great to be able to archive these.

I've mentioned before that I'm a stationery fiend. I love having a notebook on the go for jotting and clipping useful snippets in. I definitely won't be abandoning that practice any time soon, but for me Evernote's real power lies in being a notebook for online stuff. I can cope with having two notebooks - one real, one virtual. That's not messy, that's just good sense.

Thing 10 - Pushnote? I think I'm missing something...

At the risk of sounding narrow-minded, antiquated and just plain un-cool - I don't 'get' Pushnote. What's it for? Erin tells us (in her well explained and mercifully easy to follow post on Thing 10), that it's for "when you want to comment on web pages". But I don't think I've ever wanted to comment on a web page; certainly not in a way that didn't involve ranting to whoever happened to be in the room with me, in a very informal way that really should not be transcribed and archived. If I had some criticism that I thought was actually worth making I suppose I feel that I'd be better off emailing the webmaster than commenting on Pushnote. And for sites and pages that I like and think are worth sharing, I'd rather use Twitter, or my blog, or an email, or a real life conversation. It's not that I'm averse to the idea of classifying, evaluating, organising, archiving etc (I'm a librarian after all). I know I could use it purely for my own purposes to, as Pushnote puts it, "rank [my] all-time favourite things on the web", but there are other ways I would rather do that, like using the (I don't like to boast, but) frightfully well organised favourites list in my web browser. I know a favourites list doesn't allow you to make notes in the way that Pushnote does, but Pushnotes really pushes this ranking and sharing business, which really doesn't excite me. I think Evernote, geared towards helping you organise and make notes for yourself, not for the benefit of others, and without using stars, is going to be more up my street (goodness, I'd not realised how selfish I am before I wrote that!). I think what I'm trying to say is that I'm happy with the methods I currently use to evaluate and share thoughts about web pages, and won't be using Pushnote any time soon.

Twitter again

I'm off on holiday this weekend (Duns, near Berwick-upon-Tweed). Naturally I'm looking forward to it, and looking forward to the break from work (even the keenest librarians surely need a change of scene now and then?!), but - and I could never have predicted this - I'm going to miss Twitter!!! I have no mobile internet, and am unlikely to be spending my holiday time on a computer at the nearest library/internet cafe, so I shall be going cold turkey. No tweeting, no blogging, no 23Thing-ing.

I mentioned in my first post about Twitter that I felt "as if I'[d] walked in on a party that started a long time ago", and that it was "full of unique vocabulary and networks of which I'm not a part". I felt quite overwhelmed, and a bit of an outsider. But no longer! Little by little I'm working out what things mean (#ff being the latest revelation!), and building up a list to follow, and getting involved in conversations. And to my surprise it's fun and useful and effective and informative, and I begin to see (and realise) it's potential as a tool for communication in the library world, my professional life, and beyond. It's a great feeling to have 'learned' a new technology, to start thinking about the opportunities and potential it presents - basically to get excited about something new! And isn't that what 23Things is all about?!

Thing 4 - Twitter, and the joy of 23things

Well, I've signed up (murmuringgirl), I've sent (tweeted?) a couple of tweets. But that's as far as it goes at the moment. In fact, I hate to admit it, but I've just printed off some stuff from the help pages to read over the weekend, to try and get me on track (I don't have the internet at home)...!!

In all seriousness, 23things is already proving to be an extremely worthwhile experience. It's forcing me to try out things that I had decided were (for no good reason) not for me, and also helping me realise that it doesn't take long to get to grips with new things. At this precise moment Twitter seems like chaos to me, full of unique vocabulary and networks of which I'm not a part - as if I've walked in on a party that started a long time ago. But to judge from my 23things experience so far, by the end of next week I'll be a pro...(well, almost!)...