"A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it." CC minifig on Flickr
I have to admit, the first thing I did when I went about investigating other blogs to follow and comment on was scroll down the list of participants on the CPD23 site and seek out people I already knew. I don’t think that’s a bad thing; I’m not doing this to be hip or cool with my library-buddies, I’m doing this because the programme will get me up to speed with some tools that will help me to work more efficiently. The first thing I do when I set up new accounts is locate people I already know on them – twitter, linkedin, and whatnot – for one thing that’s the point of social media, but it also serves to help get acquainted with the new Thing and learn how to use it. So, I had a quick trawl and added some people to my links on this blog.
However, I knew that this wasn’t in the spirit of Thing 2 and definitely wouldn’t help me get the most out of the exercise, so when I had a bit more time I had a search through the delicious bookmarks of participants which are all handily tagged. I mostly focussed on UK and public folk. I’d love to have seen some more people in the advocacy category; at the moment it’s just little me. I’m hoping that by getting in touch with public library staff who are participating in the project, we can get together a little network of people who are keen to embrace the tools and techniques that I think a lot of academic library staff have been involved in for a while. It’s just an impression, but I do get the sense that (for many reasons beyond the control or fault of the people themselves) public library staff are a few steps removed from a lot of the really beneficial social networking and vaguely techy things out there. If my impression’s wrong, I hope that this project will help me find them 
For the time being I’m going to keep track of people’s posts in the old-fashioned way – visiting each blog using my links and seeing what people are up to when I fancy it. I think now’s the time to admit that I keep up to date with blogs in three ways – 1) bulletins – I really appreciate the CILIP Weekly Information World bulletin and the blog’s really handy too; 2) relying on twitter to tell me when someone’s blogged about something interesting; and 3) falling down blog-holes when I read one and click from link to link to link and suddenly an hour’s disappeared. I admitted to Woodsiegirl a few months ago that I don’t use an RSS feed, which I think is safe to say fairly horrified her – but my main reason for this is that I know full well I’d end up with a very large feed that would quickly become hard to keep on top of. I’m a completist by nature and I don’t like the idea of not having read Absolutely Everything that’s generated by a feed – my long-suffering fiancé has spent many a Saturday morning watching me scroll down my tumblr dashboard until I reach my last finishing-point. I’m learning to not be a completist – there’s just too much information out there for me to possibly find, read and absorb without going Absolutely Information Overload Crazy. I figure heck, if it’s important enough, it’ll be retweeted and brought to my attention some other way, or it’s in my list of Things To Check Regularly. I keep the important things in my little brain attic, see.
Anyhow, enough of how I manage or don’t manage my blog-reading, on to Thing 2 proper. I mooched about and had a read and commented on some blogs, basically letting them know I’m watching them, in a (hopefully) non-sinister way. Like many of us, I tend to read blogs, nod in appreciation and don’t comment unless there’s something particularly inflammatory in the post that’s not inflammatory enough to have me spitting feathers, incapable of putting together a well-balanced, patient and incisive response (and to be honest, I increasingly find myself without the time or patience to repeat myself over and over again with Facts About Libraries or Opinions About Governance that I’ve talked about a gazillion times before). So, I have had a good look round, left some comments and said hello, because at the moment there’s not really much more to say!
