Google alerts

I chose alerts for homoeopathy, swine flu and all whites soccer. I had to edit the swine flu topic and limit it to news items because it was inundating me. Not so much happening with the All Whites at the moment. Should have chosen to search the Black Sticks! The homoeopathy has so far turned up books for sale and a few blog comments which haven't been very enlightening. I should have perhaps gone for alternative health but that would probably cause a landslide. Maybe I should try using the spelling homeopathy without the second o which most people use. Google alerts is a great way of following a current topic or maybe a group/singer you are passionate about.

My Proquest feed with articles on xenotransplantation has produced a substantial list! This paper caught my eye ! Huh?!!

6.	Susceptibility of recombinant porcine endogenous retrovirus reverse transcriptase to nucleoside and non-nucleoside inhibitors M Wilhelm, J A Fishman, R Pontikis, A-M Aubertin, F X Wilhelm. Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences. Basel: Dec 2002. Vol. 59, Iss. 12; p. 2184

Topic 3 - RSS feeds

Soooo frustrating! Whenever I go into MyAccess Science it just takes me back to the Library web page. To top it off we have gone back to dialup here at home.

Tried the Proquest question but no luck there either. When I tried dropping the URL into my Bloglines account it gave me something completely irrelevant. Will have to move on and do this question at work with some input.

(5 minutes later)

Have just gone into my gmail and found that last nights gobbledygook worked!!! I have a feed for xenotransplantation. Yay! Now I just have to sort out MyAccess Science. Not sure I'm ready to roll this out to the public. Perhaps I better have another go when we get broadband back!

My tweet

Come November the new Auckland City libraries will offer free reserves for everyone!

Twitter and libraries

Our National Library use Twitter with a great deal of humour. Their tweets are short and pithy and when you see the photos they are commenting on you find that they have enhanced what is often quite a dated boring image. They caught my interest so that I would want to follow them.

The British Library uses their Twitter account to communicate with their followers things like their annual report being published and up and coming exhibitions. URLs in their tweets often link to a more in depth article about the topic. They have lots of followers who contribute. Some amazing photos.

Dunedin Public Libraries uses their Twitter account to inform the public of what is happening in the libraries. They have now over 500 tweets. The lighthearted comments make it an attractive account to follow.

TWITTER - topic 2

In Twitter Search I used the term geocaching, something that has always intrigued me but I haven't actually tried it yet. The results only showed in one chosen language at a time. There were lots of tweets in the last hour and even one 2 minutes ago. The same search in ChirpCity gave quite different results. The first column shows tweets from the Official Global GPS Cache Hunt Site. The second column has tweets containing the word geocaching and they were in a huge variety of languages.

I tried Auckland in Twitter Search and got tweets about the weather, the food festival and all sorts of personal asides. In ChirpCity there was only one tweet in the 1st column from the Auckland Saas Special Interest Group and I recognised a lot of the same tweets in the second column that were the same as in Twitter Search.

It's often hard to make sense of a comment on its own because it is short and can be very personal. . To use Twitter to maximum effect you need to follow people's comments over time to build up a picture. The tweets linked to fuller articles on individual topics are most useful.

TWITTER

I looked at John Key's Twitter. It is obviously done by his PR people. It gives a very positive image of our PM and some great photos of overseas trips and sporting contacts.

NZ History Online is very different. Much more academic with a snippet of history for each day of the year. When you go into individual articles you get a full "this week in history" at the end of the entry. There was a recent entry for Maori Week which gave 365 useful words and phrases in te reo Maori. Lots of variety in the tweeting! Nothing very exciting when I put in my birth date in history. We lost a cricket match in 1955 with the dismal number of 26 runs! and we signed a CER agreement in 1983.

I did set up a Twitter account the first time round with Web 2.0. Small talk is not my thing so so I haven't bothered using the account. People like Stephen Fry have a great reputation cos they love to tweet and people love to follow celebraties.

Creative Commons

The Creative Commons licence conditions for this Web 2.0 learning programme and the image that I looked up on Flickr happen to be the same. They both leave you free to share and remix, provided the user attributes the work to NSL or the photographer, and neither allow commercial use. These conditions can be waived if you get permission from the owners.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/markandmikeabroad/2977204503/sizes/o/