Thing 3: Consider Your Personal Brand

OK so, as instructed, I googled my name. Luckily this was quite a straightforward exercise for me as I have quite an unusual name.

The first result that came up was my entry on the Oxford graduate trainee blog from last year, where I introduced myself. This is obviously out of date, as I am no longer there. However the entry is proof of my traineeship if anyone wanted to check in the future.

The second entry was a farmers forum discussing whether or not it was safe to burn laurel (as in the leaves). Suffice to say that does not reflect me personally!

The third was 192.com which gives address details taken from the electoral roll. This was a surprise to me as I didn't realise personal details were so easily accessible online.

After another entry discussing whether or not it was safe to burn laurel prunings were my project presentation and handout from the spreadsheet project I undertook during my traineeship at Oxford, followed by my Facebook page.

I realised this blog did not appear, so I altered the settings so that it will now appear in Google.

Thing 2: Investigate Some Other Blogs

There are so many people doing the CPD 23 things course! In fact, so many that it was almost quite overwhelming to select ones to read. My eyes were drawn to the ones with interesting titles, like Library Wanderer, Meandering the Bookshelves, Eliterate Librarian and Random musings of a librarian, almost.

CPD 23 Things 2011

I am doing the CP 23 things course to build on the 23 things course I did last year in Oxford. This blog continues from the one I made for the course last year. I learnt a lot about Web 2 from the course last year and I'm hoping this course will make me more proficient.

I'm particularly looking forward to the sessions on Online Presence and Twitter, as I still need to work out how to use Twitter. I'm also interested in the sessions on Librarianship Training Options and Careers.

The End

What have I learnt from the 23 things programme...
It's introduced me to a lot of Web 2.0 resources that I either knew about but didn't know how to use, or didn't know existed. It's a shame I didn't have time to do the extra tasks.
I really didn't like twitter, but I liked google reader and have used that since.

Week 11: Widgets

I found the widgets fairly simple to add to my blog and to my igoogle page (once I had remembered the right ID - there are so many of them now!)

I think it is useful to be able to link different Web 2.0 resources in this way.

Week 10: Office 2.0

I found Google docs easy to use. It was sort of a cross between notepad and an email. I didn't think there were enough options available to make it as versatile or as useful as Word. However useful it would be to access your documents from any internet connection without conflicting software issues, I would not be comfortable storing my documents on the internet when I can place them on my own computer.

I found think free quite slow to use, not only to load but also to create a document. I do far prefer it as an interface and it is much more similar to Word, so if it became faster I might be persuaded...

Week 9: Wikipedia

I am quite familiar with wikipedia but I had never visited wikipedia's page about itself or looked at the discussions. The wikipedia page led me to the portmanteau page. I think the definition is accurate, although I would take issue with the reference to "mimsy" meaning "flimsy and miserable". Then I looked at the discussion tab to the portmanteau page, where the first point of discussion was why most wikipedia pages lead to portmanteau! I am inclined to agree with this because it has definitely happened to me before. However, I do agree with the general concern about wikipedia's accuracy. As it can be edited by anyone, it's not that useful for academic research.