Wiki wiki what?

Trying to find wikis on Google isn't easy. If you use the word wiki in your search you are going to end up with about 6000 wikipedia pages in your results. However I did find a link on wikipedia to another wiki called Health++ which had a list of medical wikis. There were quite a few so I didn't look at them all.

Of all the Wikis I did look at "Ganfyd" appeared to be the best. Anyone can read it but only Medical "Professionals" can join or edit it. This could be useful to patients who want to research their own condition or Professionals who just want to do a bit of research.

Special mention goes to "mla-hls" a wiki aimed specifically at Hospital Librarians. As with all projects created by a large group of separate individuals the content varies widely in style, quality and quantity but this can be said of all wikis.

Alerts

Google alerts is another web tool I have used in the past. Unfortunately I found myself swamped with too much useless information. This was many years ago so Google may have refined and improved Alerts since then. However, I am sceptical about its usefulness.

JournalTocs is easy enough to use once it is set up. I've subscribed to the Lancet but on reflection would it not be just as simple going to the Lancet's web page and subscribing to the RSS feed directly? Maybe JournalTocs is more useful when you set up alerts for keywords instead of searching for specific journals.

Again Twitter does not impress me. You have to go and look at the people you are following to know if they have tweeted anything of interest. In my opinion, Alerts should come to you, you should not have to go and look for them.

I don't think I'd use Alerts in my personal life. I prefer to track down any information I want because that way I'm likely to find other information I'd be interested in. That last statement seems at odds with my opinion of twitter, but looking at tweets is different than browsing websites. Websites are more personal, Twitter seems a bit cold.

Welcome to Twitter. You'll never leave...

As the person who is primarily responsible for my Library's Twitter feed, twitter is nothing new to me. I have however created an individual twitter feed just for the experience of setting one up as it was not I who created the Library Twitter feed.

I'm not particularly fond of Twitter. I find the character limit on posts restrictive and I'm just not the kind of person who like to Tweet.

To sum up: I use Twitter when I have to in my job but I don't see myself using it for personal enjoyment.

Really Simple Syndication is Really Simple

RSS feeds is not something I've really gotten into before. I'm not sure why but they never really caught my attention in the past. I had a stab at them during the Olympics, trying to keep  up to date with some of the events without having to watch them. For reasons I don't remember I never really got on with it.

Thanks to 12 things I'm having another go and I've been introduced to google reader. Its very easy to use. I've already signed up to some of the feeds from New Scientist's website as well as BBC news.

I can see some uses in a work environment. Following health related feeds would be useful so we know what is going on in the industry and possibly spot changes as they happen so we can stay ahead of the curve. Having an RSS feed for the library on the other hand would be a useful alerting or advertising system for our users.

So to sum up: RSS is easy to use and potentially useful.