So, having been away a week (and having used doodle and firefox ad infinitum anyway), this is the time for the social networking magnets.

Facebook I know and have an intimate love-hate relationship with.

Twitter I have been strenuously attempting to avoid - and it wouldn't let me join anyway.  Over-capacity, they say.  Hmmm, not a good sign for a global network empire.

Facebook, though... continuously slapped down in the media as an unsafe place. Unsafe for teenagers, unsafe for adults.  I can quite understand people not wanting to join and pervade their personal details all over the web, so that Facebook can lovingly sell them to advertisers you really don't want to hear from.
Hard to leave, too, I hear - you can deactivate but not delete your site once set up.
Bit of a bummer really - I'm already a member.

For me, however, it's not this that stops me making a hasty exit.
It's the fact that, and I must stress this, through no fault of my own it is deeply entrenched in my social life.
I offend people by missing parties I didn't know about coz I didn't go on Facebook.
Grr!  They are junkies and everyone else gets drawn in.

But apart from the negativity, there are some things I quite like.

I like the potential for using it for work.  The library pages I've been on are great; they present a different face of the library, almost like the equivalent of a soft-seated teaching area.  An online Learning Grid stylee.
This is good - I think taking down the barriers of formality can only help to students get involved.  It's a really accessible and relevant style.  And if it's not your style, you probably aren't on Facebook anyway, so what's the harm?
Facebook pages could do with some work, though - they have tried to overcomplicate matters by allowing different amounts of information to be added to different categories of page, and of course once it's set up you can't change the category.
Could cause lots of problems if you need to give people essential info on your library or business and there's nowhere to put it.

Twitter I find more irritating - I get distracted by short bursts of info. I don't like people texting when I'm concentrating, for example.  But I know lots of people who love it - it's just not my style.  And they wouldn't let me join, so I'm sulking.

iGoogling

Ahh.

Much more satisfying.

True, there is an annoying 'Theme' option, which eats time as you wonder whether the mint-green foliage or the slightly overblown mountainscape will be more compelling as you stare out into the office of a Monday morning, but actually I can see the use of this.

Perhaps a way to keep up with the news that works?  And if I can get the calendar to sync properly, that could become an 'at a glance' reminder, really visual.

Of course, there are loads of things to get rid of (I went a bit happy with the delete key over most items - the games, the advert-ed gadgets and so on) but for once you can really pare it down to the essentials.

And it could be irritating to load the whole thing up when really all you want to do is a quick Google search.

But it is a fragment of time that could prove to be useful, especially as I don't always manage to keep in touch with the rest of the world around me.

Blog heaven?

So I've been wondering who had the inclination to keep a successful blog.

So far the idea's been strangely compelling.  I love the design side of it (though WHY I went for Blogger over Wordpress I have literally no idea) and there's something rather satisfying about sharing those random perusals.  But to actually keep it going?

I guess I'll see. So many people, so many thoughts; anyone who can write a blog and keep it going over the long haul certainly has my respect.  Maybe these are those elusive finisher-completer types who I can only admire from a distance - do blogs work for people who just like new things?

23 Clouds begins...

Journeys in the cloud lands...