Seek and ye shall find - Thing 6

Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are - José Ortega y Gasset

Thing 6 in the 23 Things schedule asks you to "consider your personal brand" and suggests as a starting point, Googling yourself to find content associated with your name. A Google search brings up: an Australian illustrator/street artist/blogger who encourages doodling as a means of self-expression and collaboration; an American soprano; an Australian swimmer (with a differently spelt surname); my LinkedIn profile amongst a list of other users who share my name; and my profile on my work's website. MIT's Personas project threw up network error, try reloading ;( which is less a comment on how the Internet sees me and just a standard error message (other participants have also had access issues).

Over at socialmention the only exact match to my name links to a Youtube video of someone (not me) miming and dancing along to (I've Had) The Time of My Life from Dirty Dancing in celebration of a friend's birthday. I may, back in the distant past have attempted the Dirty Dancing lift at the lido with a school friend (frankly who hasn't?) but that was long before the days of digital cameras and smartphones.

My Facebook and LinkedIn accounts are both in my name. My Facebook account doesn't appear in the Google search results, I suspect because my privacy settings are pretty high and the majority of my content is open only to friends, and friends I know well rather than a friend of a friend of a friend who I once met in the pub. LinkedIn is 'professional' but I've mentioned previously that I've not yet fully engaged with it, a task for Week 4 of this project. I always find it difficult to decide how to set out my CV and do anything to avoid the format which requires a personal profile at the top of the page, as I've largely 'soft' skills.

I use Instagram under a different name, which I started using as a creative outlet for photo a day challenges like the one listed here but some months are better than others!

My digital footprint, the one I can find not being a tech-geek/IT specialist/GCHQ employee is very small and I'm happy with that. If I had a message or an idea that I needed to 'get out there' I could
certainly make myself more visible, but at present, I have nothing to say.

Catching up

In terms of catching up, Thing 4 (registering the blog with the 23 Things team) was done pretty swiftly after signing up to the programme, weighing up Blogger vs Wordpress vs Tumblr and choosing a title.
Thing 5 (exploring other blogs and getting to know other participants) is something I'm doing on a weekly basis as more blogs get added to the site, and the programme unfolds.

Thing 3 - Social Media and me

A Friend to All is a Friend to None  - Aristotle

At work I use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Flickr. There was a need for us to raise our profile so we claimed and carved out a space on all of those networks, though Facebook and Twitter are used most frequently.

In a personal capacity I mainly use Facebook to stay in touch with friends, both those in the UK that I see anyway, and those who have moved further afield. I'm not interested in sending fruit to people's orchards or engaging in other games on Facebook. I did once engage in a few games of a Scrabble-esque application but that application was a dirty little cheater that did not know how to spell correctly so was quickly binned!

I have a LinkedIn profile but as I consider myself to have a job rather than a career it seems a little pointless to me. It'll be interesting to explore LinkedIn further as part of 23 Things to see if I'm missing something.

I don't use Twitter personally though I do look at the Twitter feeds of friends and others. I can see how it might be useful for an organisation or an individual to disseminate their mission/work etc but it does seem a bit 'playground' at times, particularly when people express divergent views in 140 characters. I am amazed at how uncensored some people can be on Twitter, and then amused at how stunned they are when their words are seized upon by others and investigated (Lord McAlpine case, online abuse of Caroline Criado-Perez for example).

I'm looking forward to exploring all of the 'things' in the series and finding out how I might use them (or not) professionally (Google Docs and Dropbox) and personally (once you Tweet you can't stop?) and I've signed up to some of the lunchtime Engage sessions to expand my knowledge of how such things are used elsewhere in the University.

Who knows where it may lead......

Stepping into the Unknown....

This year I'm embarking on Oxford's 23 Things for Research. You can find more information at http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/23things/all-about-23-things/

I'm not a researcher, and I have some experience with the tools the project will cover but I'm interested to learn more about how I can apply them to my role.

I hope I can keep up with the programme during the mania of Michaelmas Term......