Thing 17 - LinkedIn

This week's Thing to explore is LinkedIn and I must say, I'm not particularly enamoured with it. I've had an account for a couple of years (invited yet again to create one by a friend and colleague of mine) but haven't really used it as such. I can appreciate its strength as a purely professional networking tool (exit the frisson of Facebook with its blurred boundaries between work and social life) but have had too many people I barely knew, or didn't know in a professional context, sending me Contact Invitations to not view it with a hefty dose of cynicism at this point - especially since LinkedIn warns us that by accepting the contact invitation, we could potentially be asked to write a reference for this person at some point. Right now LinkedIn seems to me to be the poorer parent of Facebook (more fun) and Twitter (more vibrant), and I'm not sure I can find the time and energy to devote to yet another .

At this stage I'm also starting to suffer from Thing Fatigue (a brand new syndrome currently claiming many victims among the Cambridge librarian population) and while I have enthusiastically embraced several of the previous Things, I simply cannot muster the energy or the enthusiasm for LinkedIn. Will I persevere with it and do my best to reap the benefits of it? Yes, certainly. Will it ever become one of my favourite Things? I strongly doubt it.

Thing 12 - Delicious

I was grateful to Emma Coonan for giving us the opportunity to look at her Delicious bookmarks without having to create a page myself to start with, and going through the whole rigmarole of setting up yet another account with yet another set of usernames and passwords.

Anyone who uses more than one computer will immediately see the worth of a tool such as delicious and not having to set up bookmarks on every machine used: add to that the relief at keeping personalised bookmarks and tagged websites on a shared computer and you have a worthwhile tool indeed. This means that within a library context, delicious could be an interesting tool in a hot-desking environment, to keep track of personal bookmarked websites and other customised settings; or for several part-timers sharing the same computers for example.

I very much like the idea behind it and way it works, but 23 things fatigue has now taken a strong hold on me and I don't just want to set up another account. I've realised over the past few days and weeks spent blogging about 23 Things that I do have a fair few out there and will be concentrating on those first. Plus, she says sheepishly, it looks clear and uncluttered but in all honesty... rather dull too.

Personally, I have little use for it at this point in time and while I'm sure I'll come back to delicious at some stage, I'll be spending the time I'm freeing for 23 Things exploration for other Things first. Delicious will still be there in a few months' time if I decide then to give it a serious go I'm sure, but for now I won't be pursing it.

Sorry!