¡Al final!

Perhaps my favourite novel of all time is the Savage Detectives by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. A beautiful book about two friends in Mexico City who get in to trouble and have to flee the country. The book covers their separate journeys through Europe, South America, and the Middle East, and is told - almost entirely - through vignettes from people whom they have known. Sometimes they are not named in person, sometimes their names are different but impression we form of them is through the impact they have made the lives of others. For me this is most apparent in an episode where the character Arturo Belano - based loosely on the life of the author - contrives a scene for a former lover who watches a sword fight with him and a critic from afar, barely able to make out who is who. I think it says a lot about literature and the role of the writer but also about the lives of many of us today as social media technologies allow us to shape our own narratives through a new medium.

The past 22 things have not always been new to me but they have introduced me to new ways of using the resource or they have told me how to get the best out of what I am using. A nice example is flickr, which I use a lot to view photos uploaded by friends but have never used as a photographic resource before.

They have also give me a renewed confidence to use social networks and to add people I know. As silly as it may sound, one of my greatest drawbacks on social networks was that I always hesitated to add/follow someone, even if I knew them well.

I know that sometimes I may come across as a cynic with these technologies so here are somethings that I now use that I did not before:

• The blog: I enjoyed the blog a lot. Having to write something every week was good fun at at the start allowed me to be creative, before I went on holiday and had a mountain of adding/location changes to catch up on. I have also enjoyed reading the other participants blogs, when updated, which has allowed me to keep in touch from what sometimes feels like a bit of an outpost.
• Creative Commons: I knew very little of the Creative Commons before I started. This thing was very useful.
• Delicious: As I spend a lot of my time using a number of different computers I have now started using this a lot.
• Twitter: I am not yet a full convert but I do use this at work to keep up to date with developments in the IS profession.
• LinkedIn: I really did not like LinkedIn before I started but I now see it as an effective, if still problematic, tool for creating and maintaining a professional network.
• HTML: I decided when I started that I would write every blog post entirely in html (yes, every link and every list) to give me better confidence. All my html is self-taught and adding link after link can be tedious but I find it a really empowering tool. My highlight of this blog was writing the html for a fully linked footnote.

As my final day as a trainee is looming, I hope that people maintain their blogs and various social media so that I can keep up while I am away. If you don't already have me, I also have another blog, where I post short stories in Spanish but hope to maintain after this 23things project, tumblr, and twitter. You can also find me on LinkedIn and google+ although I am still not really sure how I will use that. I hope you have had at least a fraction of the fun I have had writing this blog.

cacharro22: Meta-Searching Meta-Hither and Meta-Tither

It's quite interesting that of the entire internet, the main search engines return near uniform results. The major differences in the results for my searches were that Bing gave me more foreign language pages and that Ask, and other search engines, promoted retail websites.

I know that google has a habit of tailoring search results to our history so I was wondering whether the meta-search engines take that into account, whether they use a generic google, or whether their google output is based on their own history.

I will still use google because I can play with the settings with more ease to fine tune my results.
 
Cool extra thing:
I now have a resource to answer this perennial question.

cacharro 21: Searching hither and tither

We covered the internet in our IT lessons at school. It's reassuring to know that all three search engines recommended to us - askjeeves, dogpile, and google - are still alive after 10 years of google domination. So this was a bit like a trip down memory lane, except with flashy new designs.


I searched for three things:

1. My partner's name
   As the joint author of a number of academic papers, as well as having a photography blog, and the usual social network things, I thought this would be a better choice than my name. Bing and Yahoo turned up the same results with her blog first, followed by a scientific commons entry, members of her lab, and a list of papers. I was impressed that the blog came out first. Ask¹ seemed to favour social media first followed by individual blog posts and was a little disappointing.
2. Enrique Vila Matas - a reasonably well known Spanish writer in Spain but with only two books published in English.
   Again, Yahoo and Bing were similar: first a wikipedia page, followed by his English website, a facebook entry, his Spanish website, and some interviews. Whereas Ask promoted ebay, amazon along with an irrelevant website on fashion.
   
3. The Aleph - in particular the short story by Jorge Luis Borges although it could also be a number of other things.
   All search engines turned up the same results, exclusively referring to the short story or to an writing about the story.
   

I love Wolfram|Alpha. I have even recommended it to students at the desk as it can be used for getting nice summaries on stocks and indices with much more clarity and information than many other free resources.
I also love Oaister and used it all the time when working in ILLs when looking for PhD theses. I recommended it for use at the desk as well for searching for theses as it can often save the student time and an ILL fee.
Scirus and TechXtra were new to me and I like them but I need more playing to know their strengths and weaknesses.

_____

1 because it's not love but the bomb that will bring us together... sorry for the Smiths joke.

The twentieth thing

When I try and think of things that I can not remember, I think of familiar sounds until eventually the word/name/concept materialises out of the ether. I don't watch TV but listen to the radio instead, not while I am doing other things but as a past-time in itself. Radio4 is a lifeline; it provides news, comedy, drama, and lovely documentaries. My mind contains a myriad of facts harvested from weird documentaries on radio4 and I make liberal use of them so that other people think I am well read, when in fact most of it is transmitted straight into my brain. Unlike Twinset and Purls, I am very audio centric.

You would have thought that podcasts are perfect for me then, and you would be right. Recently, they have proved very important in learning Spanish. I have podcasts ranging from beginner lessons through to intermediate and advanced lessons, which demand listening with a pen and paper. I also have great podcasts on conversational Spanish as well as some excellent podcasts from the Spanish equivalent of radio4. My current favourite being El Ojo Critico (the critical eye) basically a Spanish Front Row with a Spanish Mark Lawson.

While there is a lot of scope for podcasts within university education - lectures being the obvious step - and libraries should provide resources for learners with disabilities or just an audio bent, I don't think that they can be used as part of an effective information literacy programme in isolation. Information literacy largely uses visual interfaces, which makes wholly audio resources difficult to conceive. Also, the information behaviour of students that I have seen as a trainee suggests that what they are often after is a quick solution to a problem they didn't envisage.

The ultimate problem for information literacy programmes is to provide a service that people don't think they need. Podcasts in isolation won't be effective as their serial nature requires users to be interested from the start. Were I in charge of an information literacy programme, I would try and get information literacy - if not librarians - into lectures as well as departments. Perhaps even there could be an information literacy certificate for students to append to their CVs, which could give them an edge in the market. I understand this sounds like the naivety of someone entering LIS school and is wildly unrealistic. Does it make me want to become a subject librarian? Well, it sounds like a big task. We'll see.

A boring post about youtube.

Thing 19: Youtube.

I often wonder whether it's just me that gets put off by fun earnest types. Perhaps it's a worry that such eagerness to seem interesting or fun belies a sense of desperation. Perhaps it's a worry that at heart I'll never be that fun. Nevertheless it has haunted me for as long as I remember; I never could get into wacky children's TV. I didn't even like Fun House.

Looking at the videos has brought back some of those memories. I'll be honest: I cringed. I personally would not use youtube as part of an information literacy programme other than as a hosting site. I would prefer that the video content be part of the library's web services, embedded into the content there.

I also wonder how much such videos engage students. I would be surprised if many students would hang around for 5-10 minutes to watch a video on youtube. I don't think they see it as much of a priority. Students seem pretty arrogant when it comes to assessing their information literacy.

I would prefer a series of video presentations - using camtasia for example - with audio and video illustrating how to use the library service, closely linked to the web content of the library, and no more than a few minutes long. Students seem to worry about information literacy when they need it.

I know this makes me a boring killjoy but don't worry, I've known this for a long time.

Coming up: Podcasts and some musings on an information literacy "strategy".

The autodidatic quests of this ingenious hidalgo: A Quixotic tale.

There were a few novelties on the list of things last week with things that I had mainly come into contact tangentally but that never really explored. Recently I have been ploughing through Don Quixote (in English as the Spanish would be impossible), which has made me wonder about my various attempts at teaching myself things. Here is a quick run through of my adventures:

Slideshare #16
in which our hero encounters a collection of presentations and ultimately relflects upon the couragous deeds of chivalry

In the past I have stumbled accross slideshare from links from presentations. This was the first time that I have used it as a resource. Being an avid autodidact, I am always looking for new resources for my next project. So I selected three topics to evaluate this collection.

1. Computer things - I am on a mission to make myself more computer aware, recently this has covered markup languages, mainly XML. I found lots of presentations from beginner to advanced by searching XML and other related key words.
2. Maths things - Another project is learning about the branch of mathematics called set theory, which was loosely covered in my maths lectures as an economics student. The resources I found here were very basic and only seemed to cover notation, perhaps this flaw is the nature of slides being summaries.
3. Literature things - I found the resources even more sparse as I continued into the more abstract realms of literature. Although a search for the great Don Quixote de la Mancha did throw up this great presentation, which puts real life landscapes to the quintessentially Spanish novel.

POR ESPA�A CON DON QUIJOTE

View more presentations from formespa

Above all I am impressed by the international nature of slideshare; my searches returned presentations in English, French, Italian, and Spanish. For a moment I felt part of an international community, which was nice.

Wikis #17
in which our knight errant faces his most stressful demons to date

Wikis are scary. It's fun playing with content but it's scary when it is something that everyone has contributed to and there is the possibility of deleting things forever. I added my blog to the 23things section of the UK library blogs. I write and edit my blog posts in html because I like the control that it gives me but editing the "source" was too scary. So I tried entering html with the <a href="..."> bit but it left a box with JavaScript, which was also scary. In the end I just left the http://... address in the fear that doing otherwise would break it!

Delicious #18
in which the fraught dealings with Wikis are put to rest as our hero emerges triumphant

I've had a Delicious account for a while now but never used it. After I got rid of the handful of ancient links and got started afresh I realised that I had found something very handy indeed. Working on a handful of computers scattered hither and tither throughout the land means that I make frequent use of email drafts to save nuggets of interest and while I have tried things such as evernote and delicious before I have never really been able to keep up.

This time I put the effort into organising and maintaining my delicious account for a week and I am impressed by the results. I like the search facility a lot. A lot. Sad I know but I like the ability to filter by tags as well as by tag exclusion as well as the graph for tags added by time. I will definitely be using this in the future.

Thanks to Delicious leading me to yet another apt comic from xkcd.

Evernote
an addendum quest which acts as a clever little moment for reflection on the week

Evernote is a lovely little tool that I have been using for a while but as with some of the things from this programme it is probably most effective for people who are very organised. I am not. I pick things up and put them down without finishing them. I am not synced. I don't have all of my applications up to date and nor do I want to. My concentration is fickle and I like it that way. I carry hundreds of notes and lists written down on scraps of paper and while Evernote is probably the perfect tool for organising everything I find it requires a patience that I don't really have. I suppose it's a matter of habit, like writing a diary, which is something else I've never been able to maintain.

Doodle and Google

Doodle was new to me and using it was straightforward. I liked the features and it was really easy to use. Crucially though, I think would imagine it works best with a large group of people or for when the meeting and a time frame is already agreed. When I tried it, the lack of an option for "not" this time and an undefined time span essentially meant we had to confirm by email in the end anyway, thereby doubling the things we had to do. A good example in how not to use technology purely for the sake of it. I think that it would be a useful thing to use when n>2 because the number of emails required to get all to confirm rises exponentially.

I love google docs. I have been using them for years. Recently I have used it to help my brother apply for university by being allowed to view and edit his applications and I am maintaining a spreadsheet with my sister as we plan our next adventure - a hike in Finland during the midnight sun next year. I didn't know that you could embed google docs. That's something I want to try in the future.

Next week: sharing.

Survey on 23things participants and their commutes.

I quite like Survey Monkey. Although I haven't had a huge amount of time to investigate as much as I would like, I quickly put together a survey here to try some of the features. Anyone who knows me, or who has worked with me, will think it apt.

I would like to know whether there is the facility to create conditional questions (in the form if you answered x then complete question y) which would allow for more specific questions. I am interested to see what it will let me do with the analysis.

The Lancet Liver Fluke: an eccentric but true adventure.

Inspired by seeing the other prezi presentations in the 23things project I decided that I should have a go myself. I tried to be educational and picked a subject that not many people on the project would be familiar with as a test on how well this medium can introduce new subjects.

Perhaps the venerable Don Quijote de La Mancha, whose love of literature drove him insane, seeing stories of chivalry everywhere he set out on an adventure where we get our word quixotic, had a point. Nature does often appear to have been written by Holly Martins. Perhaps it's true that "The world doesn't make any heroes outside of your stories" as Harry Lime tells Holly, but there are strange tales of subterfuge, cunning and manipulation. Here is a good example:

Copy of The eccentric life-cycle of the Lancet liver fluke. on Prezi

I tried to follow my guidelines from the previous post but played with the idea of the narrative using a cycle. The canvas approach also lets the life-cylce of this parasite be seen as a whole and people can zoom in at particular points. I think it is for presentations like this where Prezi works best.

My prezi principles.

Presenting is not easy. Over the years various media have developed to aid us with presentations but it's important to remember that it is only an aid. When I was a masters student at LSE our Econometrics lectures were delivered on blackboard in an exhilarating fashion by an excellent lecturer and we all sat there, week on week, writing down all he said and wrote. This was a very important lesson in communication for me and, as librarians are doing more educating, it is worthwhile remembering that the medium is not the be all and end all, rather an aid to what you say.

I think people are too hard on Powerpoint, it strikes me that we are often too eager to damn the medium rather than the presenter when our concentration wains. Slideshows can still be innovative, one of my favourite bands when I was at university was the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, who crafted songs to go with vintage slides picked up from carboot sales. Jennifer Egan's A visit from the Goon Squad features an entire chapter in powerpoint (you can find Egan's tips on using the medium for telling stories here).

Prezi combines the "canvas" approach of the blackboard and the slides of Powerpoint. While it's good at making presentations spin and swirl I think its strength lies in the ability to arrange the information on a canvas and draw connections between them. I'm a rather dull chap when it comes to presentations; I only like the motion between prezi "slides" when it is used to carry out a narrative - for example the zoom in function is great if used to emphasise a detail and if the panning movements represent a logical train of thought from start to finish - otherwise it's pointless and makes me feel a bit seasick. In other words, I want as few things between the information and me as possible.

If I were to use Prezi for presentations I would try to stick by some rules:

1. Zoom to focus on detail and pan out to generalise, to cover a wider issue, or overarching point
2. Twist and swirl to demonstrate conflicting arguments
3. Use left to right movement to construct a narrative or a sense of progression
4. Never do something for the sake of it
5. Always make sure you are the main focus of the presentation

I have put some effort into thinking of an interesting prezi but at the moment I am without inspiration. Luckily, when my sister was taking a course in teaching english as a foreign language I suggested that she use Prezi to liven up her classes, which I think is a good simple example of using its strengths without becoming nauseating.

Fashion Victims 2 on Prezi

¿Qué opinas? What do you think?

At the start I used my experiences with Twitter to illustrate some issues I have with social media. Over the past week I've been putting in a lot of effort and while there has not been a revelatory moment, I am now more comfortable with it. Here are a couple of thoughts:

• Information source.
  Twitter can have a number of uses but for me it's just like an interactive form of teletext. I can search by hashtags and filter something like the old teletext news feed; I can watch real time reactions and keep track of things like the Tour de France and the News of the World fallout as it turns toxic. Although I wonder about its value; I can get these things elsewhere, often covered in greater depth, on news websites. I don't think I gain that much from seeing it all happen in real time but it does feel more exciting.
• Conversation analogy.
  I am not comfortable with the conversation analogy. For a conversation I need to know whom I am adressing but with Twitter I don't; it strikes me as being like shouting into a dark cave and waiting to see what echoes come back. Twitter is not a conversation but rather provides a medium for user interaction: it is good at providing people with a medium to interact with information; it provides a medium to broadcast as well as receive; and it provides a marketplace for people to advertise and generate a sense of brand interaction or strong brand identity. All of these provide opportunities for libraries but I do not see it is a conversation.
• Talking Personally
  I follow a variety of accounts from personal to corporate. This means I get personal conversations between friends from which I would usually be excluded mixed with news items, interesting pieces of information, and the occasional plug. At times it can be a fascinating polyphony but I still find it annoying. I do find this mixing of public and private space odd and I have noticed that Twitter is a medium where larger organisations adopt similar language. ¿Qué opinas? asks El País What do you think? wonders the guardian yet I wonder why they care.
• Taking Time
  Twitter is an excellent resource for links and articles using a crowd sourcing principle to filter the internet. However, it does take time and frequent attention. I will persevere with it but as an information source. For a while I have used it as a newsfeed for my tumblr account, I also publicise blog posts I have written for my Spanish friends, which a great way to learn a language as their comments are encouraging as well as helpful, and the occasional interaction.
  

Many thanks to foryouriasonly, Twinset & Purls (again), and Oli for their informative posts on Twitter, which have been very helpful.

Ice cream and some things to catch up on

I didn't plan it to happen this way but a trip to see my sister in the Alpine city of Turin was arranged long before I knew the 23things programme. I'm not sure it's possible to feel alienated by a zeitgeist - the Germanic root of the word leaves me lost for an appropriate metaphor -  but if this geist does have some form of anatomy then it's definitely given me the cold shoulder when it comes to Twitter and LinkedIn. I was relieved to see my trip coincided with these two things and I did a splendid job of putting it off by spending the majority of the last week eating Italian ice cream, drinking Italian coffee, and doing little else.

So now that I have returned from sunny and stormy Italy. Bouyed by some lovely posts from Twinset & Purls, Peter, Oli, and Eliterate I am going to try with these two technologies and I will write it up later in the week.

First some preliminaries.

I've been on Twitter since the start of October and find it reasonably useful for some kinds of information. As usual Phil Bradley is a brilliant resource, as is Ned Potter, I get updates from friends who are not on other social network sites, or use them less frequently, news from my main news providers (El País and the guardian), and Armando Ianucci always makes me laugh. Thanks again to Twinset & Purls [idem] for this presentation by Ned Potter although I am sorry to say that while I am not all that familiar with the "to tweet or not to tweet" debate, it struck me as a series of straw men felled by an ill-fitting slogan (mixing my metaphors), which is a shame because I generally find Ned really encouraging.   

I have never had a problem with character restriction (I send text messages all the time) but I don't like the neologisms or the information overload and while lists help I think you really do exposure and frequent visits to cope. At the moment I think the most important part is selection - both of audience and feeds - but we shall see later in the week.

I joined LinkedIn a while a go but like other people on the programme failed to see the point. It struck me as being rather corporate and soulless. I just carried out a contact search of my gmail account and the people it suggested weren't really who I want to contact through this medium but I will put some more effort into it.

Straying off track: daydreaming, Belchite, then flickr.

Sometimes when my mind wanders off, it travels the long dusty roads of Aragón to the ruins of Old Belchite. Away from the once imperial city of Zaragoza, whose nightlights were gazed upon by a young Eric Blair and where an old slaughterhouse has been transformed into a public library, we travel past olive groves and along ancient roman roads tracing lonely straight lines through the expanse of the Aragonese countryside: "Polvo, niebla, viento, y sol/ Donde hay agua una huerta" (Dust, fog, wind, and sun/Where there is water, an orchard) so goes the song; "this land is Aragón".

"Resistencia" by SantiMB CC License: A NC ND

Belchite Viejo is a haunting, if not haunted, place. It was a key battle site in the twilight of the Spanish Civil War and was left in ruins after the eventual defeat of the Republican forces as a monument to the dead. A new Belchite was built next to it and the residents have looked onto the ruins of their old homes ever since.

Like much of the history from the Spanish Civil War, Belchite is left officially untouched, perhaps so that it can be slowly eroded from the landscape by the baking summer sun and the relentless North Wind el cierzo, that chills the bones throughout the winter, like memories gradually fading from the public consciousness. This pact of forgiving has silenced a generation whose stories could bring life to these unnameable skeletons in Spanish culture and I worry that it has cast a sense of guilt on those who have things that they can never forget. I think I am straying off topic.

If I were of a more poetic bent I would be able to conjure up the effect of walking around Belchite Viejo but I lack the skill to do so. Instead, thanks to flickr, you can get a flavour of the place, which was also used as a location for the films "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" and Guillermo Del Toro's beautiful "Pan's Labyrinth".

I was introduced to flickr by two locals from Belchite: Belinda and Isaac Baquero, both use flickr to share their photography (analogue SLR and digital SLR respectively) and be part of an online photographic community.

Pueblo viejo de Belchite by pocketmonster CC License: A NC ND

The inscription, written before CC and therefore cited often and without attribution was written by another Baquero, Natalio, whose brother Adolfo I was lucky enough to meet but passed away earlier this year.
[My translation]
Village of Old Belchite, no more are you walked (or haunted) by youth, no more do they hear the jotas (traditional songs) that were sung by our fathers.

Ruminating on common cud.

Sometimes I wonder whether everything in economics can be reduced to a sheep analogy. From the start, Ba-Ba Blacksheep teaches us about supply - three bags full - about demand - one for the boy- and about tax - one for the master. We also learn about the process of turning a sentient being with the apparent ability to respond to economic interrogation into a commodity - have you any wool? Perhaps this marxist-vegetarian critique of pre-school literature should be studied in greater depth although I dare say it already has.

It doesn't always have to be ovine often any ruminant would do the job. Goats were the ruminant of choice when I studied commons theory as an economist. The argument goes thus: If we were all goat farmers living in a pre-industrial village - probably one of those ones you see on biscuit boxes - and we all used the village common to graze our goats then we would exploit the common ownership and overpopulate with goats. However, if we all had our private piece of land there would be an individual cost from over population and so we would graze just the right number of goats for the society. This tragedy of commons is a nice illustration of the conflict between short-term private interest and social goods.

Self-interested profit-maximisers aren't fans of commons. Nor are [neoclassical] economists. We can take the reverse argument for looking at intellectual property. Suppose we all wanted to make money from our ideas. Why be creative when you get no money from another using your intellectual property? If creative commons really existed then no one would create.

(Found in flickr commons. Taken from The County Archives in Sogn og Fjordane and photographed by Paul Stang. Note the fence!)

Fortunately, I am a bad economist, and so are users of flickr. Yet I wonder what the incentives are for contributing to creative commons. The corollary would follow that the profit motive is missing. I would side with a social explanation: recognition of peers, participation in a collaborative process, and perhaps an altruistic one as well.

Twinset&Purl has written a great piece about the creativity potentials of commons and broadly I agree. However, I would like to propose two things to think about:

1. Creative use of found or commons material isn't new, has a long history, and was important in artistic circles in the last century despite the copyright law. Three examples that spring immediately to mind: Picasso's violins from 1912, the cut up period of William Burroughs, and the sample culture of electronic music. While these examples profited artistically, they also did monetarily. Whenever I think something is out dated, I always have to check to see whether I’m just being naive.
2. I wonder about the decline of the profit motive. Perhaps we have been captured by some form of sample bias. Let us not forget that one of the key requirements of Woolf's fictional sister of Shakespeare, along with a room of one's own, was an independent income. Use of and access to the internet is not evenly distributed by income - especially by world standards. It's easy to be creative when you have a job that gives you the income and time to do so. Perhaps we are already in the position where the use of creative commons is reserved for an elite. I also would like to know how many creative people want to contribute creative commons up to the point where they can start charging for it.

Certainly current legislation feels clumsy however, I think the discussion of it gets much more complicated when considering scientific information. Perhaps this is because the peer review system in science already gives a non-profit, social benefit and peer recognition that relies on private intellectual property rights. I think the six level CC is an interesting attempt at mitigating the threat to the nonrivalry and nonexcludability of intellectual property while protecting it from the tragedy of commons exploitation. I wonder whether it can be formally implemented. Anyone wanting to read a thought provoking manifesto on the use of cut and paste, found text, and commons in art might like Reality Hunger by David Sheilds, which I am currently reading.

Next: flickr.

RSS Revelations

Being an indiekid at university was hard. Frank Zappa once complained that while people in the USA go to gigs to watch the band, in the UK people go to gigs to watch each other*. To succeed in indie circles at university meant more than being into alternative music; it should be music that only you and a handful of people know and better if no one knows at all, especially if it's a demo tape, preferably before members of the band had met, or had even left the womb.

Imagine how hard it must be for an indiekid in this day and age, where anyone can go on line and search for early Belle and Sebastian EPs - even worse now that Spotify can allow people to listen for free and will also give them recommendations on top. Not that many people ever did - ability and incentive are different things - but I suspect it was this fear of depleted exclusivity rather than a social instinct that drove indiekids onto blogs. Keeping on top of lots of music blogs is hard work and thus the RSS feed was a godsend but an RSS feed stuck in your favourites doesn't let you know when new posts appear; for that you need a Reader.

I was slow to Readers and often leave mine unread so that when I log on again I have hundreds to browse. However I did not realise that they were such a powerful tool. For a while now I've had three folders: Español, following blogs on newspapers; Library, following some LIS blogs; and Music. I now have a 23things folder, which keeps an eye on all you folk.

I find it annoying that once you have hovered over a post it just vanishes from the feed meaning that I make liberal use of "keep as unread" and the star system to return to posts later. I also find it very hard to keep track of comments on posts. Finally I find that I don't read them very deeply, especially if I follow a prolific blogger. I wonder if it is just me.

I did not know about the cool extra thing and I have been playing with this over the last few days. I now have a few EBSCO feeds, google searches, and I am trying to sort out Zetoc feeds . One great thing I have discovered is how to get RSS feeds of pages that do not have RSS feeds. First you need to go to here and paste in your url, then you can put the output into your Reader. I have combined this with a site search; my, previously mentioned, favourite author Enrique Vila Matas writes occasionally in El País so I now have a feed of that search, which will also tell me when he is mentioned in articles.

All in all, a very instructive week.

*
I heard this on a recording of a talk he gave to some American music students, which I found on a Captain Beefheart internet archive years ago and unfortunately I cannot find the url to cite my reference.

My own web1.0 to web2.0 transition?

According to gmail, my first email on that account was received in mid September 2004. What halcyon days they were! Back then you had to be invited onto gmail, it was the month before I started university and it seems my most important concern was circulating my Vogon Poem from the BBC website's Vogon Poetry Generator.

I remember setting a google homepage (which later became iGoogle??) shortly after and it seems I have not touched it since. Three of the gadgets have now expired or are "unable to retrieve". I also had a daily chess puzzle, a BBC news feed, two feeds from the New Scientist, one from the London Review of Books, my gmail inbox, as well as google translate, a currency converter, and "word of the day". Today's word is sallow.

I have kept the word of the day, the translator (sallow in Spanish is 1.sallow 2.cetrino 3.sauce 4.poner cetrino), my inbox and the LRB.

I have added the guardian, a Spanish word (s) of the day (replantar = to replant, el mechero = lighter, la cañada = gully or cattle track), and a gadget that allows me to search the RAE if I want more information on the words, which has informed me that la cañada is also a payment made by ranchers to allow them to take cattle through a ravine. I bet you didn't think you'd finish the day with that piece of information as you sipped your tea this morning.

The most interesting part for me was playing about with the organisation on the screen. I understand that "in the trade" this is sometimes referred to as "information architecture". I enjoyed rearranging the gadgets on the screen in a way that felt "intuitive". Although this "intuition" is guided by how I expect to use the information; the structure of the information we present is more important than I thought.

Now that I have brought my iGoogle account back from the dead I am forced to reflect on why I stopped using it in the first place. When I open a browser, I often do so for a reason. I found that having a homepage just got in the way of what I wanted to do and soon the novelty wore off. Plus with browsers like Firefox and Opera, that save tabs once you close them down, I could leave these pages open on my browser to have access to the information I wanted. Now with the new tab "stacks" in Opera, I have a stack of "social media" tabs, "news" tabs, and "current reading" tabs without everything looking cluttered. It's strange to think that I haven't even had a "homepage" for ages. Back in 2004 I asserted my identity on the internet with my homepage choices, now I view my identity as how other people see me. Perhaps this is what they call web 2.0.

Next task: RSS

See below for my 2004 Vogon Poem

Twitter as my example of social media anxiety.

One of the unforgivable Twitter sins is the introduction of the verb "trending" into everyday language. You probably won't find Twitter on its own trending feed but if there is one thing trending more than the American appetite for turning nouns into verbs, it is Twitter itself. It has even generated a verb in Spanish: Tuitear - "to tweet" (to post a tweet on the microblogging site), and a noun: tuitero - one who tweets (posts a tweet on the microblogging site).

I will perhaps come on to this later but one of the difficulties I have had in starting a blog is that I am not a diarist and I think a lot my problems with social media are personal. I have tried twitter and occasionally have bursts of enthusiasm - you can find me @matthew_seddon - but I just don't get on with it. I'm not interested enough to check frequently and I have a short concentration span, which makes reading often unrelated lines of neologisms and hash tags hard. If I did keep a diary you would probably find the entry "try harder at Twitter". But I don't, so you won't. Yet I see so much enthusiasm for this medium that I worry I must be missing something. Hopefully this series of things will show me something that I've missed.

Some of you may be aware of Stephane Hessel, the French nonagenarian formerly in the French Resistance, who wrote a cute but powerful 30 page book telling all the young folk to get angry. His slogan has been taken up in a series of protests in Spain, the Indignados have used social media to organise themselves and even spread manifestoes. My favourite living Spanish writer, Enrique Vila Matas, recently wrote a commentary piece about the use of Twitter and political movements, quoting from the late Tony Judt, he worried that the use of Twitter had dumbed down the debate.

[Linguistic] Impoverishment is here. We checked into the economy, of course, but also in the stunted language of political and twitter speech, unable in many cases to move beyond reading 30 pages a year. It is demolishing the once awesome power of words to analyze the world. And, says Judt, more than suffering from the appearance of "Newspeak", we are threatened by the growth of "non-language."*

Vila Matas is far from your literary dinosaur and has been into blogs and social media since at least 2005 (I am reading his (published) diaries... yes, I really am a fan). I hope that this course will show me ways of using social media effectively and without falling into this "newspeak" trap.

*My translation.

el primero cacharro

This is a blog linked with the 23thingscity project and as such, this is my first post.

I have started other blogs on both wordpress and tumblr in the past so I thought I would try this with the blogspot platform.

My first blog was an attempt to write a library based blog but quickly came to a halt because of a lack of material and is now a repository of things I have written elsewhere, or to help with my Spanish. The second is meant to be an aggregator of things and is an attempt to move away from the omnipresent facebook.

Finally a note on the name: 23cacharricos. In Spanish, a cacharro is a pot, used colloquially in the North of Spain, it is a "thing". Specifically in Aragonés, where the familiar cacharrico, is often used. Hence 23cacharricos.