I'm all a Twitter....not

Okay, I think I have my Twitter account set up. I found it very frustrating, I don't know why exactly. I really feel ambivalent about this form of social networking...as in, I can't quite imagine what this can really do for me. First of all, I don't have a cell phone with interenet capability, and it seems to me that you couldn't really do Twitter without that, if it is indeed a sort of minute by minute account of what one is doing. I chose about 6 things to follow initially, a few foodie folks, and New York Times books. So far, I'm not too interested in them. I've already deleted one. I had no luck at all just typing a person's name in, people I knew were twittering, and coming up with theirs. There were a couple of us trying to work on this together, and we just couldn't get anything to come up. So the ones I chose to follow all came from the recommendation lists.

Almost the second I got it set up, and had two followers, people I don't know and can't imagine how they found me...I find this kind of creepy.

I have used Twitter before to follow the proceedings of a meeting that I could not go to, and that worked okay. But I'm not sure I see how I would really use this in my day to day life. I don't see myself posting to it much, and what I have seen so far on the ones I chose to follow don't look all that interesting, so I don't know.
I think the jury is out on this one....

RSS Feeds

Oh, my, RSS feeds. I did get this set up. I tried Google Reader, which is okay, but I also set it up in my Outlook, which seems like it will be more practical. (This was on the advice of a co-worker who has hers set up this way). I set up subsciptions for a couple of things, one food blog which I like, called Orangette, and a subscription to our staff web page news update. Miraculously, there was an RSS feed already set up in my Outlook for Early Word, something I do look at but I had not really set up the RSS feed. It is fine that it is there, I just don't know how it got there. I don't know how much I will really use the RSS feeds. At this point, I don't feel like I look at enough things that regularly to warrant it, but maybe after I get used to it, I will find it beneficial. And maybe since they are in my Outlook, something I do have open every day, I will get in the habit of using them. At least I have a better understanding of how RSS feeds work and why, perhaps, one might want to use them. My new knowledge for today!

The Art of the Short (Story, that is)

I finally have gotten around to last week's assignment to listen to a webinar. I found a podcast on the California Infopeople by Michael Cart about Short Stories. http://www.infoblog.infopeople.org/2010/01/michael-cart-offers-a-salute-to-short-stories/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+infopeople+%28Infoblog%29 Another staff member and I did a presentation on Short Stories at our Reader's Advisory Conference last fall, so I thought it would be interesting to hear what Mr. Cart had to say.

Mr. Cart had many of the same observations about short stories that we did in our presentation, but his angle was short stories for young adults, so, in that respect, much different that ours in terms of audience and authors. He talked about thematic compilations of stories, as well as compilations by genre, and interlinked stories. A new term for me, in terms of a genre, was "speculative fiction." This apparently covers horror, fantasy, science fiction, etc.

The point of our presentation about short stories was that there is a new generation of great writers writing very fine fiction in the short story form. And, according to Mr. Cart, this is true for writers of young adult fiction also. I enjoyed his presentation, and have more authors and titles to add to my list of don't miss collections of short stories!