To read is to voyage through time

This blog and all its contents has now moved to Wordpress. You can find it at:

https://voyagethroughtime.wordpress.com/

I'm still getting the layout sorted out, but it should be up and running by next week.

That's all, folks :)

As the 23 Things programme rolls to an end, I've had to face up to the problem of online identities, my main issue being that I have three. I've been online for nearly four years now, and in the communities that I first joined, pseudonyms were normal. Everyone chose a name that said something about them, or related to their interests or that they liked the sound of. For many of us who've always used the internet like this, we'd probably answer to our pseudonyms offline as well as on. It's considered terribly bad form in these circles to connect someone's online identity to their 'real life' identity, and there are some people I've been talking to for years whose 'real' names I will probably never know. This is perfectly normal, and doesn't get in the way of lively conversation and informative debate.

For 23 Things, I decided to create a whole new identity for myself, which presented me with yet another issue. Did I want my new identity to be purely professional, or was it going to be personal as well? Put simply, was my blog just going to be about libraries, or was it going to include all my other interests as well, and if the latter, would library colleagues mind the occasional picture of crochet, or would craft friends be interested in all my library things? In the end, I decided that the answer was 'yes', and going forwards, I'm going to use my 23 Things blog for anything that I wouldn't post to my pseudonymous blog. Three online identities is too much for even me to handle. I've been reading about people's struggles to remember passwords with a sort of hollow laughter - I have 2 Twitter accounts, 2 registered Google IDs, 2 Google Wave accounts, 3 blogs, Facebook, a Yahoo mail account, my work email and my work login and a partridge in a pear tree. And that doesn't take account of things like Photobucket, eBay and Etsy, where I sometimes have trouble remembering my login name, let alone my password. Let me be an awful warning to you all of the dangers of internet overload, and let me point you once again in the direction of KeyPass, which may well have the power to save my aching brain.

When you're pseudonymous, protecting your privacy is important and easier. I've been intrigued by the posts during 23 Things about privacy in 'the real world'.

(quick disclaimer: After this post, this blog will be moving to Wordpress. This has something to do with privacy, since my non-professional identity is connected to a gmail account, which is what you need for this Blog. That, the logging in and out logistics, and my general dislike of Blogger, are sending me elsewhere)

Picked up from Phil Bradley's Twitter: A 2.5 year old encounters the iPad for the first time. Fascinating to see how quickly she picks it up, although he does say in the whole article here that she already knows how to use an iPhone.

I'm not entirely sold on the iPad personally, but that's probably because I have a Touch, which seems remarkably similar, only littler. And I have my netbook and no more money to spend on gadgets. People who've used it are loving it, though, so it'll be interesting to see how much market penetration they get beyond the Apple Faithful. It looks gorgeous and is easy to use by all accounts, but I find it hard to believe that Apple really believe they're going to kill Flash by refusing to have it enabled on their devices. The frustration of only being able to see half a website just doesn't go away.

Well, I added the Delicious widget to my iGoogle page, didn't like the way it looked there and removed it again. I think that's because I don't really use Delicious as a networking/discovery tool, I use it as a personal bookmarking account so that I can access my bookmarks from any computer, anywhere. If there's a subject I want to keep track of, I use my GReader account and RSS feeds, which work better for me than Delicious, I think.

I've also added the Flickr Photostream gadget to my blog, which is all well and good, but I only use Flickr for my crochet photographs, so that's what people will be getting for now!

Overall, I've really enjoyed 23 Things as a way of finding new tools and gadgets (Picnik is going to stay a favourite), and as a way of seeing how the things I already use can be relevant to a library context. It's been fascinating as someone who is already using lots of Web 2.0 tools to see what other people make of the things that are part of my every day life. Most of them will remain part of my toolkit (if Delicious ever disappears, I'm in so much trouble), some will remain on my radar (Facebook and LinkedIn, which aren't particularly relevant to me now, but might be in the future) and some I just didn't take to (ThinkFree and, I'm sorry to say, Blogger). The joy of Web 2.0 is that I've got lots of other options, and as these last 2 Things have shown, everything talks to everything else. I'll be moving this blog to Wordpress, but I can import my content, still have those gadgets in the sidebar, have my Twitter feed show up there and even connect to my Facebook account if I want to. The interconnectivity of Web 2.0 is what really gives it its strength I think. I remember seeing someone posting concerns about the diversity of websites and tools out there, wondering how we connect to each other when we all use such different sets of tools. Gadgets, widgets and our own shortcuts allow us to connect these things together in a way that suits us best, which the control freak in me greatly appreciates.

I don't have to do things the same way as you, but that doesn't mean we'll never find each other. We can still all be connected, just in a way that suits us rather than the way we're told to do it, and I think that has to be a good thing.

I absolutely love Google documents and wouldn't be without it. Although I've never used it for work, in my personal life, I use documents, forms and spreadsheets to do just about everything. My writing is all in the cloud, which means I'm less likely to lose drafts and random snippets that I might want some day, and Google forms are just brilliant. I'm running something right now that has over 60 partipants, and the forms make life so very, very much easier. I think the best thing about Forms is the way the results are kicked out - easy to interpret and manipulate however you need. Although I've never used Google Presentations - and doubt that I'd want to move away from Powerpoint for creating them - being able to upload them to the cloud means I don't have to worry about file corruption or my terrible memory. If I forget anything, it'll be there for me to edit, and I can always download it as a .ppt file again.

Rather than email my form, I thought I'd try to embed it. Click the jump link to see if it worked!

This came up on various of my RSS feeds this morning, along with an invitation to the Cataloguer's Forum, so I couldn't resist re-posting.

The speaker is Simon Spero from ibiblio.org, and he gave this 2.38 minute talk at the recent Code4lib conference. Considering the OLIS issues this morning, it seemed appropriate...



I originally picked this up from Roy Tennant's post at Library Journal

[with thanks to Wiki for the title quote]

Wikipedia is both an incredibly useful resource, and the absolute bane of a teacher/information professional's life. It's become ubiquitous as a source of all knowledge, and a recent spat with the Encyclopedia Britannica didn't settle the matter, it only added fuel to the fire.

I use Wikipedia all the time to look up TV shows and people I've never heard of, as well as finding a good source of references. A good Wiki article is an absolute mine of information, as long as you're willing to scroll down to the bottom of the page and check where the information came from. If there's nothing there, then you have to take the information in the article with a pinch of salt.

Personally, I tend to find that the factual information in Wikipedia is normally pretty accurate. It's the interpretation I find a little suspect. So the science pages are actually pretty good (or so my chemist husband tells me) because they're pretty much copied out of a book. But historical or political pages are much more vulnerable to bias - famously, the George W Bush page has to be locked down to avoid one side or the other putting their own spin on the events of his Presidency.

I took a trip over to the web 2.0 wiki and added a few lines about the wiki we're using at the Law Library for managing our reclassification project - since the wiki isn't live yet, there's not too much to say, and I expect Helen (who's done more work on it than I have) will add more when she gets to this "Thing". I also had an interesting time glancing through notes about various Web 2.0 around Oxford and particularly the thought that has gone into how they're used. We use so many at the Law Library, that I'm not actually sure we need any more, but I like to see why libraries have chosen what they've chosen. Because in the end, all these things are just tools for doing the job, and each library will need different things from them.

And since I seem unable to disentangle Things 17 and 18, I've put more thoughts about Wikipedia under the jump below

Very quickly (because twice in one day is probably more blogging than absolutely necessary), I've seen three or four posts this morning about having to remember yet another username and password for the various Web 2.0 accounts.

There are two approaches to this. The first is to have them written down in a notebook. Yes, I know that sounds crazy, but most hackings happen remotely, so whoever's trying to get into your computer is unlikely to also have access to your notebook. It's not foolproof, but for non-essential accounts (like the Web 2.0 ones), it can be handy. You don't even have to write down the whole password, just the equivalent of a security question to jog your memory each time.

The other approach is to use something like KeePass (assuming you can get past the spelling). It acts as a secure database for all your passwords, so you only have to remember one, super-strong password instead of lots of different ones. You can even set it so that it has to have a physical key as well - ie, you have to plug in a USB drive with the key file on it and enter your password in order to get access. You can install it on any computer, and it's about as secure as you can get.

It also frees up your memory, and allows you to use multiple passwords without worrying about forgetting them. Now, all I have to do is remember what passwords I used in the first place so I can put them in my KeePass account...

And it was all going so well.

It's been interesting over the last few weeks to read how concerned people are about putting their personal information on the internet. It's a concern I understand, but particularly if you work in an Oxford (or other academic) library, there's already information about you out there. Your name is already searchable, and there might even be a staff picture that's accessible to anyone. For me, things like LinkedIn and Facebook are my chance to take back control of what's out there, so that when people search for my name, the first information they find is the information I've put out there.

My concerns have more been around keeping my online identities separate. For some years, I've had an online profile that I use for most things, and while there's nothing embarrassing/illegal attached to it, I do want to keep it separate from my professional life. When I set up this blog last year, I based it on that identity, but decided this morning it was time to do some cleaning up, and so I switched over to my personal/professional email address. Blogger was fairly helpful in doing this, but failed to warn me that I would end up 'unfollowing' all the blogs that I'd been following, which is less than ideal. Never mind, they're all still in my Google Reader.

Which is the other thing I need to do now - divide up my RSS feeds and the people I follow on Twitter between the folk I want to follow professionally and the folk I want to follow personally. That's quite important, especially if I'm going to give out blog/twitter/linkedin addresses to people. While I'm sure professional contacts won't mind hearing how late my train is, I'm fairly sure they're not interested in the random conversations I have with my friends about Doctor Who! I'm hoping it might also help me be more efficient, in that I won't end up distracted by craft blogs when I'm trying to keep up with the library world. It's a nice theory, but whether I can remember all the passwords for all the accounts remains to be seen!

I am officially the happiest blogger in blogland this morning, thanks to the new customisable templates from Blogger. One of the things I always said I didn't like about Blogger was how I couldn't make this place look how I wanted, and that my options were really, really limited. If I'm honest, I still find the dashboard very confusing to use, but being able to not just tweak but completely control how my blog appears is a huge step forwards. I had been planning to shut this place down once 23 Things was over, but this might just persuade me to stay.

For more details, head over to the Blogger in Draft blog here and follow the instructions. The only thing you can't really do at the moment is upload your own photograph, but we're promised that it's coming.

Considering that when I was a student, I used to rearrange my furniture at least once a term, being able to rearrange my blog style is something that's surprisingly important to me. Thank you, Blogger!