Four Last Things

The Four Last Things, in Christian eschatology, are Death and Judgement, Heaven and Hell.

Death: well, I seem to have died! At least, my participation in the 23 Things programme has. I think this was partly due to a feature of the programme itself, which was that it was designed to provide a 'taster' of Web 2.0 technologies -- it was a lot of things to dip your toes in, but in order to get any real feel for some of them you had to at least paddle around a bit and get your feet wet. And -- I think I'd better abandon my watery metaphor here -- as with almost any unfamiliar technology it took quite a bit of exploration to get a feeling for what it was trying to do and how it was trying to do it, even if once you'd got that feeling it seemed fairly obvious and intuitive. For some things, you seemed to be required to get your feet too wet -- I'm sure for some things we could have registered their existence and features without setting up our own accounts (there seemed to be many cries of "Oh no -- not another login to remember!" from participants). And for some things we were required to wet our feet with water we'd already wetted them with in other pools, if you see what I mean -- I'm thinking particularly of editing photos with picnik, as tools like altering contrast and colour balance are things you will find in almost any photo-editing programme and, while it's interesting to know that there are online utilities you can use to edit photos any time, any where, it can be quite time-consuming actually tinkering with them (I'll increase this, and decrease that, and perhaps that's a bit too far -- undo it and have another go, and what happens if I click on this ...).

Heaven: well, I wouldn't go so far as to call it heaven, but I did have fun trying to think up titles for posts which featured the word Thing in a naturally-occurring context, and composing posts in my head as I walked home, mulling over what I might write. That was one of the reasons I didn't finish the programme -- I'm not the sort of person whose thoughts flow straight out from conception onto the page or screen (without passing through the brain on the way, it seems in some cases); anything I write has been carefully crafted, vigorously polished and then buffed up, in an attempt to convey accurately, succinctly and cogently what is in my head (which isn't always easy because I seem to think in concepts rather than words, and I can't always find the right words to put across the concept with precision).

Hell: setting up yet another username and password (see other 23Thingers, passim). Finding I'd let myself in for yet more of those bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed automated emails turning up in my inbox (Where You Can Go Next With Linked-In! -- I'm not sure I want to go anywhere with it; Jane Smith Is Following You On Twitter! -- Who? And why? I feel a bit like I'm being stalked!). Trawling through my fellow participants' blogs, trying to work out who was managing to keep up with things (or Things) and who had something interesting to say about it. Trawling through my own blog looking to see if anyone had left any comments (I may have missed something somewhere, but surely there ought to be some way of alerting a blogger to the fact thta someone has something to say about their blog. Like more of those annoying automated emails!).

Judgement: I try to be judicious rather than judgemental. I often felt, with Things to which my initial reaction was negative, that if I had time to explore them more thoroughly I'd understand how to make good use of them. Perhaps some aspects of the programme could have been more targetted -- when I complained that playing around with photostreams on flickr was all very well but what use was it to a library, Jane pointed out ways in which some libraries were already using flickr; it might have been better to introduce participants to that before getting them to contribute their own photos. Some Things gave me a distinct feeling of "old-hat" -- "Explore Wikipedia!"; I've been exploring it for years, and I know it's a useful quick first-port-of-call, but not necessarily to be relied on. And some aspects of the programme seemed a little superficial, done just for the sake of doing them -- I didn't complete the Thing involving editing Wikipedia because I didn't have time to go through all the entries on subjects which I knew a fair bit about in order to find one to which I thought I could make a useful contribution rather than just changing it for the sake of changing something. What I have been wishing for years is that there was an Oxford libraries version of Wikipedia, in which I could find things like the escape codes to use for navigating round Geac Advance, and to which we could all contribute our own "tips and tricks". Thanks to the programme, I should be able to set one up myself! (but phrases involving "can" and "worms" keep springing to mind!) Maybe someone already has ... And perhaps a 23 Things wiki would have been useful, as a central point to which we could have contributed comments for all the other participants to see.