A dijiniji by Any Other Name

I Google myself frequently, so I was not surprised by the results I found. What did occur to me while we were discussing was that there are tons of variations of my name (thanks, mom and dad!) by which people might search for me. While I have Google alerts set up for some of the most popular, I hearby vow to set up more alerts for other variations I brainstormed during class. I also am a firm believer that searching just Google isn't enough. I like to know how I appear in other search engines as well, namely, whether my professional site is appearing at or near the top of the results. It's not there yet in all of the search engines (mostly because of my recent name change) but it appears to be climbing.

I always keep my Facebook settings pretty strict. Which leads me to another inner dialogue about privacy settings I have been having lately. I usually keep one personal and one professional account with most social media sites. Originally, it seemed good to keep these things separate. Recently I realized that I never post anything controversial on either account--but it is still nice to have one account for professional contacts and one account for friends and family. I usually maintain the same strict privacy settings for my professional accounts as well. Does this hurt my online professional persona? Should I change my facebook, twitter and linkedin settings to be more public? I am uncertain and will continue to debate this amongst myself.

I also did create an about page, but I may or may not do away with it as I already linked to a welcome post about myself and the blog in my sidebar.

Decisions, decisions. Thanks for the awesome class, Rachel!

Timing is Everything

Just after our online personas class with Rachel, LibGigs tweeted this article:

7 Tips for Improving Your Online Presence

With everything we've been working on in class, all of us should be able to do at least a few of these!

Am I Too Lazy for Tagging?

I love the idea of tagging. I approve of colocation. However, I am also a wound-up librarian type. This means if I use tags, I feel compelled to apply them consistently and comprehensively to content. This means that I have to make a commitment and then devote a chunk of time to creating tags for all of my stuffs. Yes. I could just begin adding tags to all of my flickr uploads moving forward. Or, I could decide to add more robust tagging to my personal blog (which currently has more of a controlled vocabulary system). But I just can't do it! Tagging is too lax for me.

However, as I create new projects--new blogs, new flickr accounts, etc.--I find that I am becoming more open to tagging. I appreciate the potential value of tagging and would like to experiment more with it.

I am particularly interested in the Steve Project in which several museums got together to pilot a social tagging project in which users could tag museum collections. I figure museum people are wound up and if they were able to let go and set users lose with tagging, maybe I could chill out about it a bit. Just a bit. Maybe.

"RSS" or "In which the Digital Ninja does not follow directions and then fails"

So I was completely naughty and instead of setting up a feed aggregator I put two feed widgets on the left sidebar of my blog. I already have a Google Reader account and I didn't want to create another account or add the TTP blogs to my existing account.

The first widget I set up was RSS for all of the blogs of the TTP participants. Piece o' cake! It will be great to keep up with everyone's blogs. Then I tried to choose a topic and find 8 related blogs. I decided my topic would be library humor because I am always espousing it as legitimate critique and discussion of the field (I am a dork). The problem was that I only knew of three library humor blogs off the top of my head and Google and Technorati searches didn't turn up too much else. At least not much else I was willing to put on my blog. I am somewhat saddened at the lack of quality library humor bloggery out there! Come on, folks! It's a funny profession!

Sidebars aside, I love my Google Reader account. That is, except when I visit and it says I have 1000+ posts to wade through. Why can't it just be honest and say that I have 3256 posts? I know Google can count that high. They are mathematicians! Also, when that happens, I have to deselect my feeds.

Second Blog Class Today

I am excited about the second blog class today. The first class went really well. I think some people were intimidated about blogging at first, but the best moment was when one of the students said, "This is really fun!"