Umbrella: The Most Wasteful Movie Corporation Ever

Umbrella: The Most Wasteful Movie Corporation Ever | Cracked.com

This is a great, fun post.


Ironically I read this post right in the middle of my visit to the Library Umbrella conference 2011...

New The Current State of Social Media – Stephen's Lighthouse

New The Current State of Social Media – Stephen's Lighthouse

A great info-graphic from Stephen's Lightouse. Check out the blog for loads of useful and fun facts and links.

If I were Google...

If I were Google...

I would forget trying to compete with Facebook in appealing to the "everyman" (and woman and child) and try and solve some of the real issues affecting information professional everyday.

Creating value would be my goal, giving access to scholarly articles via Google accounts (maybe via publisher deals, hello Springer, Elsevier etc etc), offering alerting services based on cluster searching (see f1000Medicine who offer this to their contributors, the one feature of the service I miss most from my time there and wish I could take with me).

Allow users to make a customisable "library" of all the pages they visit most often, and offer suggestions of other good information sources, make this an interactive dashboard where I can type in a Search term and see everything that my favorite pages offer. Like Reader for searching...

Solve my information overload and access issues, then Google you would be my hero.

So go on Google, stop messing around with social media and get back to your roots. Make my life easier.

23 Things for Professional Development: Thing 4: Current awareness - Twitter, RSS and Pushnote

23 Things for Professional Development: Thing 4: Current awareness - Twitter, RSS and Pushnote

I don't use Twitter. I tried, I really did, but found that as no one was following me it was a bit like sitting at home on the sofa talking to myself, and lets face it no one but cat loving spinsters like to admit to that kind of thing in public! I admit that it must be great if you can get into it, but so far, the enthusiasm has escaped me!

I use Reader. (n fact, I think I may be an addict). It has become a bit of a daily ritual to check in to my reader first thing in the morning and at lunch (and in my breaks and whenever I need some head space...). I love to see who is out there and what the hot topics in conversation are among those in the know.

On a more serious note I have found it an invaluable professional development tool. threads like techcrunch and techdirt haven't just allowed me to follow current events in my sphere of interest but have also allowed me to get exposure to a wide range of topics, which in real life would be nigh on impossible.

Using reader is really convenient and I like the customizability of the format (see all, see only new post etc) and I like how easy it is to add or remove content. Because I like my life by the KISS (Keep It Simple Spoopid!) rule.

The only thing I feel frustrated with is that it is hard to keep different areas of interest separate, so my Hecklerspray gets mixed up with my Phil Bradley (an association which I am sure he would be horrified by) and it would be "awesome" if Google could figure out a way to allow you to stratify your interest on reader (hey, here is a neat idea, how about circles, where you can select areas of interest or people so that your content is streamed.... oh...).

I haven't used pushnote before, I guess that it is becuase I am more of a follower than a content creator.


I tend to stick to some tried and tested websites which keep me interested too, so mumsnet, which believe it or not is a good source of news and views. Daily mash (because reading the newspapers gets me down and if I spot an interesting story here I can always look it up on t'interweb). 


I also, check on journal tocs and have various search alerts which send results direct to my inbox (from BioMedSearch), but these tend to be work related.

Hmmm, all of the above gets me thinking, is there such thing as an online introvert?