My personal brand

Happy Friday, folks!

Onto thing #3 of the 23, what do I consider to be my personal brand? With a pseudonym like 'Bookbandit' - thank you, teenage self - i'm obviously residing on the more casual end of the online-presence spectrum. I like to stay true to the love of books that has carried me through most, if not all, of my life and I think this is still possible in a professional context. (Some of my labels possibly less so, but I do maintain that Firefox is better than IE and George R. R. Martin does still owe me my social life from the last few months).

Having maintained various online accounts before, mentioning absolutely NO details whatsoever, I am used to both positive and negative comments and have found that the best response is often no response: just as in real life, people often make negative comments purely to provoke a reaction and, if denied this reaction, they soon get bored and move onto something (or someone) else. Constructive criticism is quite different, this allows you to have more of a 'conversation' with the commenter who offers their own advice or opinions in contrast to your own. I'm always happy to receive feedback I can do something with!

Happily, a google vanity search reveals a lot of results for a person with a very similar name to my own, an online-presence shield of sorts. However, it does also show one of my final year undergraduate essays on Shakespearean villainy and a link that suggests you can find articles about me from 1609. Rude.

World Book Night 2013

It's World Book Night 2013, ladies and gentlemen!
http://www.worldbooknight.org/books
Appallingly I haven't read any of the selected titles this year, although there are a couple on my "I should really read that when I have the time and am not obsessed with Game of Thrones" list. 
This post also coincides with the 'official' start of 23 Things, so here follows my mission statement for the course:  

I am taking part in this process to develop my knowledge of Web 2.0 technologies. I hope that this will contribute towards my CPD, giving me a different but complementary set of skills to the library/admin work I have been in for a couple of years now. I look forward to finding out how we can use Web 2.0 in the teaching and learning process, as a way of better connecting with our learners and of course with other library staff, at BPC and elsewhere. 

Having played around with all the bells and whistles I can justify for now, I must sadly return to the serious business of timetabling. Once more unto the breach, indeed.      

Pinterest, RSS and Twitter

Greetings, readers.

This week i've successfully managed to embed my Hair and Beauty inspiration Pinterest board, something I have now shared with a member of the teaching staff. Hopefully this will give the students something a little more creative to do and show them that there are other ways to arrange their ideas. I always think, with a practical subject in particular, that it helps to have a variety of ways to work and to take on information. It's nice to have a fresh, creative way of looking at things, especially as we crawl towards the end of the week! 

In other news, I have now added a British Library news feed (RSS) and, for my sins, I have created a Twitter account. Currently I have no intention of tweeting myself, having nothing of any real interest to say, but I am following some interesting feeds including that of my erstwhile employer, Waterstones.

I'd like to think that a blog can never have too many widgets, but looking at my own I am starting to wonder ..
  

The widget has landed

Look, a shiny new widget!!  ----------------------------------------------------------------------->

This is just to showcase some of the new books i've ordered for Hair and Beauty, and so that I get to type the word 'widget'.

Not telling you how long it's taken me today to work out how to embed it ...

The Inaugural Post!

Welcome to my first blog post, ever! Being a somewhat reluctant member of the internet generation this is going to take some getting used to and I am, ultimately, much more a pen and paper sort of person (or should that be quill and ink?). Regardless, here begins my maiden voyage into blogging for the purpose of '23 Things', that is, using a blog to record experiences and thoughts of Web 2.0 technologies and how they could be useful in our library - and beyond!

Hopefully at the end of this process I will have a far better knowledge of different web technologies, blogging platforms and what on earth a 'widget' is. Who knows, I may even come to enjoy it.

Until next time!