23 Things for Professional Development: Thing #4

So, current awareness. I'm aware of quite a lot that's happening in my professional world, but I could still be missing things. And my ways of keeping up-to-date aren't exactly the same as those suggested by Thing 4. I read a lot of blogs, articles and mailing lists, but have never got as far as setting up a Twitter account - until now. So...

1. Setting up a Twitter account. The reason I haven't had one in the past is because I'm still not convinced of its merit. People have told me how great Twitter is any number of times, but I'm yet to see something to truly convince me. When reading information, I like there to be quite a lot of detail - more than 140 characters can give me. And I also don't necessarily believe the "it's great for following conferences" argument either - I've seen Twitter feeds from conferences before and tend to find they make little sense to me unless I was actually at the conference. In which case, I don't really need the Twitter feed. But I've decided to stop being an old grump, give it a try and see how it goes. I admit, I've only been signed up to it for a few hours, so this comment is premature - but at the moment it's been fun to laugh at some friend's comments. I've not really found many work-related things I want to follow yet. We'll see...

2. RSS feeds. Now this is ground I'm happier on. I use Google Reader already, and love it. It's easy to use, totally intuitive, and as the cpd organisers say, eliminates the need to keep checking sites. Every blog you care about in one easy, accessible place. This is one service I'm not sure how I lived without...

3. Pushnote. I'd actually not heard of this before. I had no choice but to sign up to this at home as work uses Internet Explorer (which I find incredibly annoying as I much prefer Firefox - I love the grouping of tabs you can do with the latest version). I was a bit skeptical about it as it felt like it just might be one more thing for me to keep up-to-date with. However, I think I'm likely to use this more than Twitter as it's just "there" when I have my browser open. I like that people can recommend webpages that might be of interest, although I'm not sure how much it matters to me what other people think of a particular webpage I've already found. This is one I'll definitely keep an eye on to see how much use I get out of it.