I have been using RSS feeds for a while now, mainly for entertainment and news but also for professional awareness. I’ve used Google Reader from the start, and have always found it to be useful and reliable. I’ve also tried to expand the usefulness of RSS with various tools. For example, I made a UK library jobs feed with yahoo pipes, which combined vacancy feeds from several different providers, removed duplicates and gave a single output. I also created an international version,  and tried to modify it to display vacancies on a map and to act like a job search tool, none of which worked as well as the original. I’ve also used tools like twitterfeed to take feeds I’ve created (eg. websites I’ve bookmarked) and broadcast them on twitter. In part I did this as I felt I wasn’t really making my presence felt on twitter, and I’d noticed others doing similar things.

I do feel that I’m not on twitter enough to really take advantage of it. If conversations are happening in real time, its no good making time to try and catch up, as things have already moved on. However, I do try and at least take a look each day, and I’ve found TweetDeck on my phone invaluable for that. I’ve also found twitter useful for keeping up on local events, which I wasn’t really expecting.

Although I’ve not used Pushnotes, in the past I’ve used similar offerings such as google sidewiki, and there are other offerings available. I occasionaly found posts from others on pages I was browsing, but with such infrequency that I haven’t used them in nearly a year and haven’t missed them. The social aspect of pushnotes is intriguing, but I’m not sure its enough to entice me in, particularly as overcoming my natural laziness and installing another plug-in isn’t likely, and certainly can’t be done at work. I’m also much more likely to discover new sites and share pages through twitter.

Not too long ago I was job-seeking. As part of this I put a not-too-small amount of time into checking my online professional presence, including very basic searches. So, I’m aware that there are several dozen people with my name that are more interesting and important (or just more self-promoting) than me, including a UK lecturer in animation, a Candian Journalist and a Norfolk local councillor, amongst others. But, I’m reasonably pleased with the results that come back when you search my name with modifiers, including ‘librarian’ and my current and previous employers, and have tried to incorporate that into my professional ‘brand’ as much as possible. Following good SEO practice, I found that having a presence on well-known social websites, such as twitter and linked-in improved my presence on the first page of search results. I’m also hoping that a personal web address might improve my web-visibility.

For comparison (and in keeping with good information professional practices!) I tried out a few other search engines, including Bing, DuckDuckGo and Ask. The results were similar in terms of content, all pulling out my twitter and linked-in profiles, but with a wide variety of sites not related to me between them. So, overall I’m pretty happy with my online presence.

So far, I haven’t had any concerns about privacy, and generally include a ‘real’ picture of myself when registering with a new service. I guess if I needed to try and disappear from the web in the future that might make things a bit difficult, but at this stage of my career I’m taking more of a ‘dandelion’ approach to things.

You comments on perceptions of ‘my brand’ are welcome.

So I don’t know if this is ‘ok’ in the CPD23 rules, but I’m going to skip thing 2 and come back to it later. This is mainly because I’ve looked around some of the blogs listed on delicious, and the majority of those I’ve viewed have only one or two posts (mostly thing 1 and thing 2). Rather than try and follow everyone, or start following people only to find they don’t make it, I’m going to wait until about week 5 and then come back to this and see who’s interesting out of those still following the programme. I realise this might negatively affect the visibility of my own blog, but I’ll try to comment on interesting posts as I come across them, as well as some of the professional blogs that I follow already that are taking part.

So they say its better late than never, and as I’m now about two weeks late to the start of CPD23 I’d probably better get a move on! I’d like to pretend part of my delay was in deciding wether to go with a custom domain or not. This was partly decided by a timely post on BoingBoing about why authors should have their own websites. Having previously tried blogging at blogger and with a string of accounts scattered across the web, so far I’m happy with my decision. Having tried (and failed) to regularly blog in the past, I’m also hoping that this might prove motivation enough to get me writing regularly.

I wanted to join in with CPD23 as there are a lot of dedicated library professionals out there, and I occassionaly find myself wondering why I’m not involved in the profession more. I think there’s a good mix of things, and I’m particularly looking forward to thing 5 (reflective practice) as I think I really struggle with this, and thing 15 (conferences) as I’ve attended a few but never presented, which I’d like to change.

So, I’d really like to be involved in such a large, open and active group of professionals. Also, I’m currently working on a fixed term contract (hmm, thing 22 could be useful too), so a bit of professional awareness raising couldn’t hurt!