What an arrogant oaf I am. Only two posts ago I was blithely dismissing most of the content of cpd23 as things I already knew about. Yet here we are, on Thing 3, and i’m already completely stumped. Confession time: I don’t think that I have any personal brand whatsoever, and in several instances, I seem to have done the opposite of what Jo recommends.

I have different usernames for my email (robrien4), Twitter (@inthesoup), WordPress (awkwardreverence), Facebook (/robob) , LISNPN (Rob O) and, most importantly, Words With Friends (rrrobrien – challengers welcome). Across these platforms, I use a number of different profile pictures, most of which involve at least part of my face being obscured.  This isn’t because i’m attempting to cloak myself in an air of mystery, but rather that I seem to be incapable of pulling a regular, sensible face for photos. Instead, I usually end up looking extremely alarmed, as if i’ve just sat on something sharp. This ‘look’ is much more difficult to pull off if i’m sipping from a mug or turning away from camera, even if it does make me slightly more difficult to recognise¹.

The issue of my actual name is a little muddled, too. Although most people call me Rob and i’d introduce myself to new people with that name, I always use Robert on official documents and my CV. To complicate things further, a small number of people stubbornly call me Bob or, if they’re feeling particularly cheeky, Bobby (note: I am not, have never been, and will never be a Robbie). I was also a Tom for a short while, but that’s definitely an endnote story².

Whilst i’m happy with the title of this blog, i’m aware that the address looks a little awkward (is it saying Rampers and K? Ramp Ers And K? Ram Per Sand K?). There’s also no visual coherence between it and my twitter page, with both using a standard, ultra-vanilla template. I’m yet to cross-reference everything, so my online presences are all adrift, with only my Twitter account popping up in the early pages of any Google search for my name.

These are all issues that cpd23 is definitely making me reconsider, although i’m going to read around a little more before making any significant changes and deciding whether a fixed ‘brand’ is something I really need, or want, to cultivate. At the very least, i’m going to try and tart up this blog a little.

If these aspects of my online presence could do with a tidy up, i’m more content with the tone I adopt on Twitter and elsewhere. I don’t tweet a lot but when i do, I try to be positive, polite and well-punctuated, and aim to avoid posting anything that i’d consider too banal or negative. In part, this is a matter of taste: I find hashtag games and bandwagon-jumping twitterstorms tiresome (even if I agree with their sentiment) and am shocked by how angry some people seem to get on Twitter, even over matters which probably deserve it. I don’t really feel the need to use the internet as an outlet for my bile, preferring to bottle it all up and occasionally let it out by doing some tough manual labour or sobbing into a quarry.

By keeping things fairly light-hearted , I hope that my online persona is an accurate reflection of my offline personality, which i’d like to think is enthusiastic, optimistic and cheerful (anyone who has met me and disagrees with this is free to correct me in the comments but that does mean we will have to have WORDS and, quite possibly, A FIGHT). Keeping any major gripes or unpleasantness off the web also means that i’m fairly relaxed about any colleagues or potential employers stumbling across anything i’ve put up.

One minor concern is the personal/professional balance of my tweets. As i’ve not worked in a library for the last few months, my recent focus has definitely been more personal than professional. Whilst i’ve still been able to join in with some library chat and tried keep up with news and developments within the sector, i’ve definitely found it more difficult to do so than when I was actually working within a library. Fortunately, i’ll be back behind an enquiry desk in a couple of weeks time so the tales of cataloguing mishaps  and induction gossip should be pouring out of me again soon.

1My current Facebook picture shows my face being completely obscured by my hand. As my profile is locked down very tightly, anyone who isn’t friends with me only really has that picture and my name to go on when trying to identify me. In contrast, my sister’s Facebook picture features a clear and very recognisable shot of her face. We have lots of moderately-distant family members who have added her as a friend but not me. I reckon that there are two possible reasons for this: a) they don’t recognise my profile as belonging to me, or; b) my extended family detest me.

2Several years ago, someone thought that my name was Tom for at least a month. During this time I saw or spoke to him on half a dozen occasions, as we worked in the same supermarket and had a couple of mutual friends. I only realised the error when he introduced me to someone else as ‘Tom’ and, embarrassed for both of us, I held off correcting him for the rest of the evening. There was a certain frisson to having a new name, though, so I started using ‘Tom’ as a handy pseudonym when speaking to cold callers or sending nuisance emails to radio DJs. I added the surname Brockleton in an attempt to sound like a Woody Allen character and am apparently the only person in the world with this (fake) name. If I ever take up a sideline in writing romance novels, join Equity or have to flee the country, i’ll definitely be using it.

photo from joshmaz on flickr

The bewildering number of participants in cpd23 means that i’ve found it tricky to decide what other blogs to follow. Should I stick to those within my sector or venture into the murky waters of corporate, school and public libraries? Should I only look at blogs with a clever name or fancy template? Maybe I could follow Bill Drummond’s example and arbitrarily restrict myself to only following those that begin with a particular letter of the alphabet. Or what about seeking out extremes: I could try to find the oldest and youngest bloggers, those from the most northern and southern points of the globe, or the biblioblogosphere equivalents to Ayn Rand and Emily Dickinson, churning out the lengthiest and most concise posts respectively.

In truth, most of the blogs i’ve looked at so far have been those that have popped up in my Twitter feed. However, i’m conscious that a lot of these belong to people that I already know in some capacity, whether because they’re former work colleagues (Sarah, Ruth, Lorna), classmates (Helen) or the many people I feel like I vaguely know through conference chitchat, Twitter and LISNPN. Whilst my natural nosiness means that i’m keen to find out what all of these people are up to, I want to try and ensure that I get a broader perspective. 

For now, I think the best solution is just to lob as many blogs as I can into my Google Reader and try and sift through them when I get the chance. I’m hoping that other people will act as a filter by highlighting posts they’ve found particularly interesting, too. My Reader feed has been depressingly unruly for a while, piling up thousands of unread posts in a matter of days (a fact that i’m looking to address when we reach Thing 4), but by grouping all of my cpd23 subscriptions within their own folder, I can hopefully keep things under a reasonable amount of control. There will almost certainly be more content produced than I can possibly keep up with, but I’m going to try and keep in mind the principle outlined in a fantastic article about pop culture consumption by NPR’s Linda Holmes (The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything), which discusses the ways in which we deal with the impossibly vast amount of literature, music, film, television and art available to us. Holmes suggests that we have two options, culling and surrender:

 Culling is the choosing you do for yourself. It’s the sorting of what’s worth your time and what’s not worth your time. It’s saying, “I deem Keeping Up With The Kardashians a poor use of my time, and therefore, I choose not to watch it.” It’s saying, “I read the last Jonathan Franzen book and fell asleep six times, so I’m not going to read this one.”

Surrender, on the other hand, is the realization that you do not have time for everything that would be worth the time you invested in it if you had the time, and that this fact doesn’t have to threaten your sense that you are well-read. Surrender is the moment when you say, “I bet every single one of those 1,000 books I’m supposed to read before I die is very, very good, but I cannot read them all, and they will have to go on the list of things I didn’t get to.”

It is the recognition that well-read is not a destination; there is nowhere to get to, and if you assume there is somewhere to get to, you’d have to live a thousand years to even think about getting there, and by the time you got there, there would be a thousand years to catch up on.

There may be an argument to be made that culling’s attempts to classify and compartmentalise cultural artefacts is more in line with the principles of librarianship than the reckless abandon of surrender. Nevertheless, i’m going to stick with surrender for now, if only because I can’t think of a pop record with the word ‘cull’ in the title that is as glorious as this:

Secondly, just as some people hate looking at photos of themselves or listening to recordings of their voice, I really dislike reading anything i’ve written. Serious things like essays or job applications are okay because they demand a level of formality that means I can write off any clumsy syntax or laughable phrasing as inevitable side-effects of the format. However, whenever I look back over anything more informal and personal like emails to friends, forum postings or any of the many, many items of juvenilia that my teenage self littered around the web¹, I shudder at the mangled prose and bad habits (including excessive dependence upon parentheses², ‘i.e.’, ‘e.g.’, exclamation points! and FLAGRANT CAPSLOCK ABUSE)³.

I grew to loathe my own writing so much that I quickly began to write less and less, to the point where outside of work or study settings, my writing is now largely confined to the odd email and a fairly sedate twitter account. I’ve tried to justify this by saying that if I only have a finite amount of time to read genuinely good writers, why would I detract from that time in order to force more substandard doggerel on the world?. But in truth, I know this is a pretty feeble excuse: i’d really like to be a better writer and know that the only way to accomplish this is to put some effort and practice in.

With this in mind, i’m grabbing onto cpd23 as an opportunity to try and ease myself into writing again. I’m hoping that the pressure of the timetable will force me to curtail my dithering and get on with flinging a few hundred words at the internet every few days. I’m already familiar with most of the tools and resources that are going to be discussed, so my focus is likely to be more reflective rather than exploratory. I don’t want to bore anyone (not least myself), so there will probably be a host of feeble gags, half-formed anecdotes and very tenuous digressions to come.

1There was an awful lot of this stuff. I was one of the first people in my year to have home access to the internet and would spend most evenings mucking around online with anyone else equipped with a 56k modem. Aside from playing a lot of Quake, running IRC gameshows and playing out elaborate chatroom frauds, we made a lot of scrappy websites that only greasy fourteen year old boys would find amusing. These included a conceptually-flawed advice column written in the character of Coach Fuller from the ropey basketball sitcom ‘Hang Time’, a Yahoo group solely focussed upon discussing the Les Dennis/Amanda Holden/Neil Morrissey love triangle, and an extremely vitriolic campaign against the UK garage movement. Later on, I contributed popculture bumph to a couple of thunderously unpopular webzines desperately trying to emulate Vice, Buddyhead and Pitchfork, and maintained a mopey Livejournal account mostly made up of gig reviews and mildly amusing things that had happened to me whilst working on the checkouts in Sainsburys. With the exception of a pretty-decent article about graffiti in Liverpool, thinking about any of this stuff makes me feel slightly nauseous. Fortunately, most of it has long since fallen off the internet, unless you’re willing to spend a while snooping around archive.org.

2I am fully aware of the irony in complaining about my dependence on parentheses by using parentheses.

3Defining this tone is difficult. I think its a tendency to use lots of unnecessarily long words whilst adopting an odd ironic formality, with frequent lapses into lazy superlatives, snark and smarm. I’m by no means the only person to write like this: it’s the kind of stuff that blights Guardian comments threads, pompous Amazon reviews and listener emails to Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s 5Live show