To twitter or not to twitter

I've been hoping there's a way round this one, but I can't see how to get out of it seeing as though I can't complete Cam23 without it, so I've created my own personal Twitter account. I've got an addictive personality (I've recently got obsessed with Glee; I spent practically my whole day off yesterday watching it), so that's why I've been actively avoiding Twitter for so long. I'm the same about any new technology: Napster, myspace, facebook... Take mobile phones as an example; I'm still using my first phone, the Nokia 3310 which I got in 2002.

I have been using the Judge Library's Twitter account, but only to post about work information such as new books and things, that's why I haven't felt the need to make my own account. I knew it would happen, that I'd get into it too fast too soon; I started off innocently selecting people to follow, along with the obligatory ones like Stephen Fry, I added John Cusack, DisneyPixar and Peter Serafinowicz. I've just found Miranda Hart too, I adore her TV series and she's always good fun on panel shows, in interviews and as a guest on the likes of the Strictly Come Dancing backstage gossip show It Takes Two. She was awesome by the way. I'm going to stop now before I get in too deep, I've replied to a couple of tweets so I'm being obedient.

I agree with the essay about categorising and tagging as I'm against pigeonholing of any kind. I'm not even sure how useful the subject classifications are in library cataloguing to be honest, I don't use them when searching as they're so subjective, no pun intended. Although I do put them in when cataloguing of course. Therefore I agree with Shirky's comments about how biased it all is. I especially like this quote from the essay: "The essence of a book isn't the ideas it contains. The essence of a book is "book." Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained." Jeez, I hate the American way of spelling. To combat the limits of tagging and categorising, I've labelled this post with as many things as possible and deliberately added references to this post to make it as full as possible. I've also dutifully added more tags to my previous posts and I've just found that there is a 200 character limit; it's being pesky about it...

I've been having fun commenting on everyone's blogs. It can take the smallest of things to make me feel the urge to comment, from a picture of a Miyazaki film, to beautiful photos; all it takes is a common interest. I'm loving libgeek's Terry Pratchett titled blog, Ange's Grease-themed blog title and Helen's frequent references to popular culture (told you I'd get my own back).

All this new technology has made me long for the more innocent times when we didn't rely on all our computers and they were just for fun. Anyone remember the Commodore 64?

Mindboggling iGoogle

I used iGoogle for the first time yesterday, if only to check the weather. Incidently, it's fine all week, though we might get rained on on Sunday. Whoever said the British were preoccupied with the weather was absolutely right, or them saying that may have made us that way. Anyway, such musings are sending me off on one of my regular tangents. I'm trying to remember to load iGoogle first thing in the morning, getting into a habit is always hard and then it kicks in and it's like you never lived your life any other way. The problem is, my work has a shared Google calendar which is set up with our work email address, this is for our timetables, meetings and so we know where everyone is, but my iGoogle page is set up under my own email address, so I can't have both up at the same time. After a while it seems to log out of whichever one I'm not logged in on if you see what I mean, or if I try to add something to the calendar or change something on my iGoogle page, I won't be able to as I'm logged in on the other account. I have the calendar open all the time as it's very useful, and the quick links on the iGoogle page, such as COPAC and the Cam23 RSS feed, are also very useful and it'll kind of defeat the object of them if I have to sign in again. Also, after the initial eager adding of stuff, changing the theme and customising my page, I kind of got bored, in the same way I got bored joining groups, adding applications and finding friends on facebook. However I am annoyed my hamster seems to have escaped, either that or the application has failed to load. So I'm not sure how often I'll actually use it, though it is nice to start the day with the weather forecast, an inspirational literary quote and a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. Here's today's: