I like investigating new tools that help me with my work and learning.

I’ve been using Twitter for many years and in recent times, I have been strongly deliberating whether to stay on it or leave.  It’s true that I have made many friends on this platform and build a great network of people around the world over the years.  It’s been instrumental in helping me learn, connect and grow.  It has given me so many opportunities that would never have come my way.  Everything from new friends, new work, new jobs, new travel opportunities.

But why would I leave it?

Well, like I said, I’m in two minds. Every time I leave it, I come back to it because of the….people.

Also, Twitter represented to me opportunities for learning – through conversations and people sharing what they’re doing and learning – but over the years, this has dribbled to the point that even now, I struggle to find anything worthwhile to share.  Much of my sharing comes from RSS Feeds (I use Feedly Pro+ with the AI bot that trawls content I want to read) which is providing the variety (as long as I continue to tweak it because I’m finding it seems to trawl only Medium articles).  Also the reduction in people blogging has basically meant that I’m struggling to find things that pique my curiosity. Sure, there are people who are still actively sharing (thankfully, we have some people who still do this) but many in my Twitter networks have finally gone elsewhere, stopped sharing or moving into online private communities.  It’s a pity but I do understand exactly why they would have done this.  After all, I’m thinking of the same.

As such, it’s made me think about a lot of things about stuff I have written over the years on this blog – and just how much stuff I have written EXTERNAL to it.

I have written a lot of Link Rot – the fact that curation has a time limit and soon over time, the links we store then become Internet 403 errors – redundant.

I feared that all my ramblings across the web would be lost and that I should have kept them in the ONE place (ie here or on my YouTube channel) rather than have myself split across multiple sites where I would have to rely on algorithms to have to surface them at weird times (case in point, Facebook Memories… “this time last year….”)

As such you may have noticed more of my blogs are of screen shots and links to what I shared on Twitter.  In some way I’m trying to reign in and pull in the work on Twitter back into my blog – somewhere where it’s mine and where it’s searchable for the future.

I’m an avid user of Advanced Searches in Twitter – as it’s how I find lots of great stuff (if I can trawl through the tonnes of vendor/business content which I dismiss) and using Advanced Search on my own Twitter handle means I can search my own tweets and recall some information I sent out.  I would recommend it especially if you tweet out some valuable content that helps others.  You can see the linkages and themes of your tweets over periods of time too.

Another option I have been using is a Chrome extension called Thread Helper.

Once you download the extension, it sits on your Twitter page and as you can see from the top diagram, it takes up the real estate on the right of your Twitter page.  As you type in a word in your tweets, it trawls through your previous tweets on the SAME topic and surfaces them up again that you can copy and paste into your tweet.

Here’s how it works:

It’s a nifty little tool that helps you recall what you have written in the past.

Have you used this tool? What do you think of it?  Are there any others tools that help you curate your own content so that they’re not lost in the quagmire of the web?

(Right the next thing I need to learn is why WordPress isn’t creating a graphic from URL. The more I add photos to my blog, the more space it uses.  I need to add them as LINKS to prevent this space issue in future because it will slow down this site.  For some reason, despite adding media as link (with a URL as a .png) it STILL creates a link and NOT the photo.  Wonder what’s going on???)