23 Things – Thing 23 Wrap-up

Wow, the end of my 23 Things journey is finally here and (unsurprisingly) the final thing asks you to reflect on what you have learned and experienced as part of 23 Things, which I had been planning to do anyway, but I had expected Thing 23 to specifically direct me to do it.

Stuff I learned

• bit.ly – this looks like a good tool to track click-throughs and create short, neat urls extremely simply; I hadn’t investigated it before because I (wrongly) thought it was complicated, signing in via twitter also meant I didn’t have to create yet another account!
• Image use – I was glad to get a bit more guidance around this subject as I was extremely wary of using images that I hadn’t taken with my own fair hands.  I still am wary – but at least I know what to do now if I do choose to use one!
• Podcasts – screencast-o-matic.  I think this may be very useful one day – I have thought it would be great to do a podcast about telethons, direct mail etc and then do a screen-cast to show people/colleagues how to use the data manipulation tools that I have created, rather than writing a how-to document with screenshots, I think this would be a much more fun and useful approach.
• Wikipedia – this was a bit of fun exploring the extra tabs that I hadn’t known existed and signing up to the daily emails.

Perhaps the most useful thing that I got out of 23 Things though was the habit of blogging.  Having stablished my blog in May; my blogging could be described as “sporadic” at best; one of the main reasons for my signing up was to get into more of a habit of regular blogging – I think I have managed this (let’s hope I can keep it up).
I have also got far more involved in Twitter and following other blogs.

23 Things was part of #Oxengage – a Michaelmas term suite of events and activities getting people more involved in social media.  I went to a talk on social media and analytics, a half day course in setting up an online presence and of course, that amazing talk by Garr Reynolds.

All in all it’s been a really worthwhile experience – I am particularly pleased with my all-time high of 44 views in a day! I would recommend anyone interested in becoming more familiar with social media to try it out.