The paranoid post - or why I enjoy Librarians as a community of pure spirits.

As demanded for Task 4, I had a good look at the 100 blogs of 23 things Cambridge (although don't trust me on numbers). I am impressed, and very nearly faint with exhaustion.

I'll have but one simple question : when, where, how do people find the time ? Rather like Marsh here- who expressed it way better than I do, I have discovered that blogging, for me, was far from an innocuous activity. This is not normal.  Interneting should be, you know, natural. It's not ;  I need time, encouragement, quality-food at hand and a secluded room to be able to even consider thinking about it.

The secluded room part is important, because (ah ah surprise twist!) I completely disagree with Marsh there. The anonymity is, as I see it, one of the great aspects of this internet-thingy free-forum of expression for all. It is a chance, for once, to read and judge a text, an opinion or a comment on what it is and not on the myriad of things we know about its author.  Any reader/blogger tend to answer questions based on their assumptions of where the question or the comment are coming from. As in " Oh, I know why they have this issue- make this point, let me dismiss it as just an outgrowth of some personal experiences and not a real question-point-hehehe !" It is true that many questions develop as a result of personal experiences, but isn'it more challenging when questions are answered based on the truth of the response ? And in addition, do I really want to be forever somewhere out there in a post that I have written when I was tired /silly (a sad daily occurence)/ stupid (ditto)/ younger and more naive than I will soon be (re-ditto) ? (the answer is no).

Ok, our 23 things blogs are not as controversial as to really warrant this type of situations ;  so it might well  be that re-reading myself make me cringe.Or I just enjoy this community of librarians under the form of pure-spirits.

I know it is not possible to entirely hide my identity and I have given ample clues in the first post. Still, I don't want to flaunt it, either (my identity, that is). If you want to read more on the subject, I recommend a very good post by Celine in Thingblogging .

Ok, that was me being social. I am moving on to really comment on thing 2 and 3 and insert some screen shots. Meh.

Books Make Noise.

Good Librarians go to Web 2.0 heavens

When I was little, at home, we had a minitel. That made us very cutting-edge for 1985.

Then I grew up blissfully ignorant in my miniteled sheltered life, until when, a young and naive new undergraduate student, I visited Cambridge in the glorious summer of 1997, to learn English and the ways of the world. I proceeded to meet a young Cambridge student who punted like a god, looked really good in a blue shirt, and had an email address: I realised that I urgently needed one, too. Thanks to that summer in Cambridge, I not only improved my English really fast, but I became technically-savvy and a cyber legend among my friends back home (our university did not have a computer. I actually doubt it had so much as a a typing-machine; we wrote all our essays and dissertations by hand, not like those lucky guys in Cambridge. Those were the times). I could boast for 1 year and a half approximatively: by 1999, I could only try to impress my grandmother, and even I could realise that she was not that impressed by then. Everybody had an email address. Everybody was using the Internet.

And that's it. Since then I have been dwelling in the backwaters of the world wide web.
I got on Facebook early, but that was just an easy way to add two years to my PhD really. I tried Twitter, but never caught up (Too much Stephen Fry, not enough visuals. Either that or middle-age must have struck somewhere between 2006 and now). I tried del.icio.us but immediately forgot about it. I had a blog, but never blogged.

So here is what I expect of 23 things: to be 23 steps closer to the Librarians' heaven of communication mavens. I am not sure that that last sentence actually makes sense, but my heart is in it.