This week’s topic for the Continuing Professional Development program, cpd23 covers three tools for staying current, Thing 4: Current awareness – Twitter, RSS and Pushnote.  I was an earlier user of both RSS and Twitter, but haven’t tried Pushnote.

As a graduate student, I wrote a widely used and now completely defunct primer on Bloglines for Librarians to try to encourage information professionals to use RSS. Now, I use Google Reader for reading blogs. I subscribe to 360 blogs and it’s been growing every day of my cpd23 experience. My current method is to go through the Reader on my iPad, quite quickly, before breakfast scanning headlines. I read ones that catch my eye. For any posts that I want to revisit later, usually so that I can comment on them or capture the information in Evernote for later reference, I put a star on them in Google Reader. When I have gone through the headlines, I mark all posts as read. Later, when I’m on my laptop, I read the starred items in Google Reader and follow up with those posts.

I abandoned my Twitter account for a few years after I quit working in libraries when the feed became overwhelming and there were limited tools for handling it. TweetDeck and hash tags have made the whole enterprise useful again. I’m now active on Twitter and have added book bloggers, dietitians, and writers to the librarians already present in my Twitter feed. Follow @joyweesemoll. If your profile indicates that you are a librarian or a reader of books, I will follow back. If your profile indicates that you are a writer and your tweets are more interesting than just advertisements for your book, I’ll follow you back, too.

So, that leaves Pushnote as the new thing on Thing 4 for me to explore. And I’m resisting. There are so many tools in my life already, that it takes a lot for a tool to make the cut of being worth the effort. I think I’ll save that time and energy for some of the things coming up later in this program.