CPD23 Thing 4: Current awareness – Twitter, RSS and Pushnote

I signed up for Twitter when it first arrived on the scene but dropped it because I wasn’t getting anything of value out of it. However, dipping back into it I can see that it has matured and there is more there of interest. Rather than follow health library news only, I’ve branched out into the field that I work – evidence-based medicine. When I first signed up, I set to follow Jon Brassey of TRIP Database and some people who I virtually met through a library email list called Chatty Librarians (everything but work! Well some shop …). Now I follow EBM tweeters and some colleagues. I am CathVoutier if you care to follow me. 🙂 Twitter is blocked at my workplace, so my posts will be made at home. PS When I checked my email the next day after writing this, one of my fav EBM bloggers signed up to follow me!

I’ve been using RSS for awhile now. I have used Bloglines, GoogleReader and now am using Sage Feedreader within my Firefox browser. I prefer using Sage as I don’t always want to be logged into my Google account (if I leave my office while logged in, all my Google products are vunerable). What I best like about Sage Feedreader is that I can load the feed into the sidebar and see what articles are there without visiting the feed itself. If there is something interesting, I’ll click on the title and it will open in my current Firefox window.

Now I’m at work, I have subscribed to the 2nd listed CPD23 bundle. I see that only 20 items are listed but that is OK if it is a slow feed. If it was at the speed of BBC News (there are 78 posts this morning) I could get in trouble! I’ve had a look at the RSS feeds mentioned in this Thing and I’ve subscribed to Mashable and Phil Bradley.  So what feeds do I subscribe to in Sage? I have PubMed New and Noteworthy, Life as a Healthcare CIO, Krafty Librarian, Bad Science (my fav), laika’s medliblog, Librarian in Black, and quite a few others.

I’ve just downloaded Pushnote and it seems to work like StumbleUpon (this is at first glance as I haven’t looked much at StumbleUpon yet). Firefox has to restart before it is loaded but because I have some windows open with work items in them, I’ll have a look at this tool a bit later on.