My Favourite Tipples from a Creative Technologist
Jinfo Blog

By Kate Lomax

Abstract

My Favourite Tipples are shared by Kate Lomax, a technologist and consultant who specialises in web publishing, rapid prototyping and online learning. Kate shares some of her go-to resources in the field of technology, ebook development, and research.

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As someone who does a lot of technology consulting and prototyping, keeping up with new technologies is an important part of my work so my sources tend to be pretty technology-based.

Here are My Favourite Tipples:

• Stack Exchange Q&A Communities: These are invaluable for helping resolve, among other things, coding, user experience and even English language and usage quandaries. Though some users exhibit a level of persnicketiness that would make a Wikipedia admin proud, the combination of gamification, community support and emphasis on "asking a good question" have all helped make it a dependable brains trust.

• Pocket: This is a "read later" app which stops me from falling down endless internet rabbit holes when interesting articles or resources cross my path. It supports different devices, offline reading, tags and Text-To-Speech plus there's a whole bunch of integrations (browser bookmarklets, IFTTT recipes) that make it easy to bookmark articles and create a distraction-free reading list from tweets, RSS feeds and websites.

• The LSE Impact blog: This provides a steady stream of high quality posts about research impact, engagement and a lot of the tools inherent in research. Even if you're not in academia, it's worth keeping an eye on to catch great posts about big (and small) data, publishing, professional development, social media tools and lots of other topics.

• DBW Daily: A lot of the work I do with ebook development, publishing technology and via Biblio intersects with the vast world of digital publishing so this daily update newsletter is a helpful summary. It includes the latest technological developments for the publishing sector and interviews with startups in this space.

An article in Jinfo which I found particularly interesting:

• Online learning is an interesting, challenging area and it seems that workplace learning in particular has been fundamentally broken for a while. The recent Jinfo Research Focus on "Best Practices in Information Skills Development" was useful and "Using Competency-Based Strategies to Develop your Team of Information Professionals" by Sonja Irlbeck addresses some of the existing flaws and suggests solutions.

Contribute Your "My Favourite Tipples"

Would you like to share your "My Favourite Tipples" with the Jinfo audience? For contributor guidelines email catherine.dhanjal@jinfo.com or visit the Publish with Jinfo page.

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