[For curious non-EngL people: 23 Things is a web-based professional development programme designed to introduce librarians to new web technologies of relevance to libraries. Feel free to email me if you want to know more.]
Officially Thing #14 is about Technorati, a ginormous blog-ranking and -tagging website. Have a read about it if you’re interested, but I think it’s not so relevant to us, whereas it would be useful to play with using del.icio.us and Google Reader to help us share information with each other.
Since we last played with Google Reader it’s added some sharing functionality. Now at the bottom of each post you read, you’ll see:
- Add star (marks it for your own reference)
- Share (shares it with anyone who’s following your Shared Items)
- Share with note (does the same as above but you can attach a note with your own thoughts)
- Email (if you want to share it with someone who doesn’t follow your Shared Items, or if you only want to share it with one person)
- and a couple other things for your own organisation purposes.
But what if you find some other website outside of Google Reader that you want to share with people? That’s where del.icio.us comes in. Pretty much everything on del.icio.us has its own feed, eg
- http://del.icio.us/deborah.fitchett/23things (my 23things del.icio.us collection)
- http://del.icio.us/tag/23things (everything anyone on del.icio.us tags ’23things’)
To follow any of these, just paste the url into Google Reader’s “Add subscription”, and any new items will show up in Google Reader. (To stop following them, go into “Manage subscriptions” at the bottom left of your Google Reader screen and delete the feed you don’t want.)
So with clever use of tags and Google Reader, you can share with as many people as you like – for example, you could tell your colleagues to put http://del.icio.us/yourusername/forcolleagues in their Google Reader and tag a page “libraries architecture forcolleagues”, and they’d get a link to that page. Or (if they don’t use Google Reader themselves) you could put http://del.icio.us/yourusername/toshare into your own Google Reader – that will bring up any pages you tag “toshare”, and then you can use Google Reader’s “Email” option to easily email each one to anyone you like.
We’ll play around with these options next Wednesday and Friday.