Social media and bookmarking
One of the cool things about using social media sites such as Twitter is the myriad of interesting links on science and cancer related topics that fly by my stream every day. Clearly, the sheer volume means that you can't track them all or even read half of them, but maybe you can capture and search them later.
Well, that was my simple thinking at least and the reason I connected the Packrati.us tool to Twitter and Delicious yesterday, thinking that would be a simple and neat solution (HT to William Gunn for the idea):
Except I forgot one important little bit of detail – I'm also using Delicious to capture my science and academic papers by bookmarking them and sharing the public feed as links to this blog for others who may be interested. Now, when you bookmark manually, you can choose whether the bookmark is public or private, thus sending only science and cancer related links in my case to this blog automatically via Twitterfeed and any personal ones get hidden.
Yesterday, I set the Packrati.us Twitter to Delicious tool up and feeling rather pleased with myself, merrily went off to client meetings for the day. It was only on the way back while stuck in the rain in a traffic jam that I suddenly remembered the Delicious to Blog Twitterfeed and went a little pale at what might have churned out in my absence, one of those *face palm* moments!
Apologies to all those who got any links or stray blog posts from the Twitter links I'm curating. For now, I've turned off the Delicious Twitterfeed so no more links will post to this blog for now. Packrati.us have stated that the little box for private bookmarks is 'coming soon' so hopefully I'll be able to have the best of both worlds by curating interesting Twitter links and sharing ones I like here too.
Cool tools are great fun, but sometimes the implications of the connections and output doesn't always go as you might expect!
This post made me laugh because I’ve done the same thing with other connecting software tools. The techno-environment is moving so quickly that I often forget what I initially set up. And the relationship between software vendors is always changing, i.e. the whole Facebook mess. I’m glad you didn’t rear-end someone once you realized what you did!