What do you
use twitter for? Some people use it for professional development or just as
part of their profession. For others of us it’s more of a personal general fun
tool, perhaps a bit like an RSS feed for sites we’re interested in with added
bonus material. Some of us have no clue what we’re doing there and are making
it up as we go along.
#uklibchat is a monthly twitter chat about libraries and library and information work in the UK
That all
makes it sound extremely simple. It is, however, both exciting and incredibly
confusing to first time users. It’s a bit like being in a room where everyone
is talking at once and you have no idea what is going on. Due to the nature of
twitter, tweets in a conversation are not grouped together, everything is in
precise time order.
Because it is
so immediate, it’s very tempting to try and hurry to catch up on the latest
comment, but if that is the third reply in a conversation other people have
been having on q4, you’re probably going to have to backtrack and by which time
it won’t be the latest thing any more.
The two
things that will save you from drowning are being prepared and being very clear
about what you want to do or say, although being a speed reader doesn’t hurt.
Every chat
has a public overall topic and agenda. This is hosted on Google Docs, where
anyone can add their own questions but personally I prefer less questions and
responding to what’s there rather than adding to the agenda, which may not be
got through anyway. Reading the agenda in advance is a good idea, as is keeping
it open while you are involved, as with only 140 characters, people may just
reply to a question with just “q2” and #uklibchat without any preliminaries to
explain what went before or what they are talking about. This gives you a good
key to follow topics or when a certain question has come up. I also plan any
responses to any questions that particularly interest me or at least what I
might like to say.
During chat I
have several tabs or windows open. One for the agenda, one for my twitter
interactions, one following the hashtag and one following @uklibchat – the
twitter feed for the organisers. I try and make sure I follow etiquette and
include the question number I am talking about (eg. Q3) and the #uklibchat.
Once the chat
starts, I try to do two things, firstly skim for anything that interests me and
secondly watch out for prompts that the question I want to answer is officially
up for answering. I try really hard not to attempt to join in with every
conversation, to avoid trying to read
every single tweet and only respond when I have something to say. This takes a
certain amount of self control.
Some people use twitter clients to help them follow the chat. Of these Tweetchat does look rather good and doesn’t require you to create a separate account for it. If you aren’t going to use it to respond, you don’t even have to log into twitter. Best of all though, it automatically adds the hashtag you are following to your tweets when you reply, which is easy to forget in the heat of the moment.
The organisers of #uklibchat asked us to mention the help they can offer new uklibchatters. They have a page that gives a bit of info about how to tweetchat: http://uklibchat.wordpress.
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