Thing 4: Follow, follow, follow, follow the Twittering horde...

Yup, Dorothy, that was the look on my face at my
first Twitter attempt too!
Image from winnipegcyclechick.com

This week I am Dorothy in the Land of Twitter, with the Cam23 2.0 team as my trusty companions (I'm not saying who would be the Cowardly Lion!) and the huge, overwhelming might of the Twittersphere as the scary Wizard.

I have had my reservations about Twitter for some time, as I could not (and really still cannot) see how you can say anything of real insight in 140 characters.

But through this programme, I have realised that that's not really the point. It seems that most people in librarianship use Twitter for professional purposes, which isn't something I'd considered as Twitter = Stephen Fry and Graeme Swann in my head. But professional it is, as all sorts of work queries and LISNPN events and so on... are advertised via retweets, Twitterfeeds (more on that later) and lots and lots of interested librarians keeping within the character limit.

Consequently, after an aborted attempt at tweeting back in the winter, I'm going to try a bit harder this time and avoid trying to be a comedian in such a short space. In fact, I felt the benefit of Twitter before even returning to it, as my most recent non-Cam23 blog post (see here) was advertised on Twitter by Annie and Katie, leaving me quite shocked to find last night that it had received 100 pageviews in less than half a day.

This Twitter thing is seriously effective, it seems! Well, it is certainly effective at directing people towards links and other documents of interest quickly. I am less convinced by its use as a way of following events and conferences at a distance in real-time, as the posts are so short the meaning is sometimes lost and I'd probably rather read a comprehensive, well-written blog post after the event.

However, I feel my negative attitudes towards Twitter may be on the turn - I even had a go at this week's extra thing by setting up a Twitterfeed from this blog and using bit.ly (I think my previous post's success may have gone to my head, but we'll see!) I'll make a concerted effort to keep the tweeting up as it could be useful for library-related queries in the future.