One of the things about being married is when your spouse gets a bad cold or the creeping crud, you’re probably going to get it too. My husband got a serious case of the ick about a week ago and despite my best efforts, it looks like it’s got me too.

However it does look like my attempts to avoid it may have blunted it; I have a stuffy nose and a sore throat, but I can still breathe and I haven’t been coughing too bad.

I am in Ick Limbo; I don’t feel well enough to get any serious work done, but I’m too restless to watch television or sleep. (I’m not good at watching television anyway.)

So what does a search engine / database / online information nut do when trapped in Ick Limbo for the day? Here are my plans:

Revisit Twitter – Because of Facebook’s throttling of organic post distribution for liked pages, I’m finding Facebook as an information source less and less useful. I still use the RSS feeds I’ve generated from my fan page list, but Twitter is where I’m spending more time to have conversations and catch things on the fly. I need to take a closer look at Twitter, at people and institutions to follow, and see how I can make it a better source to find useful information to share with you.

Weed my RSS Feed List – My RSS feed list is a work in progess, but I need to take a closer look at it and finally ditch some of those feeds I regularly skip. I also need to take a look around and see if there are any new sources that I should be following. Are there keywords that I’m hitting over and over that lead me to useful stuff? I need to use those to find blogs and news sources.

Install an App or two – I have regularly said on ResearchBuzz that I don’t get Pinterest or Snapchat. And I don’t. But I still need to try these tools even when I don’t understand why they’re so popular. I don’t have to get into every last little thing, but it’s good to play and explore to keep a sense of what’s out there. So today I’ll install Snapchat. If you have any other apps you think I should try, let me know. (And if you want to friend me, my Snapchat name is ResearchBuzz. Just don’t send anything that’s too out there, okay?)

Watch my language – I need to just sit here and in between bouts of nose blowing just think a little about the words I’ve been seeing more and less of over the last year. I strongly feel that language/vocabulary is one of the less-appreciated aspects of good search engine usage / Web monitoring. Nobody talks about the “Information superhighway” anymore, but “mesh networks” are getting a workout. “Phablets” are getting more popular but the word itself isn’t getting a lot of traction. Will anyone come up with a more elegant way to refer to the Internet of Things than IoT? And should I monitor for mentions of “malware” or get more specific by using spyware, adware, ransomware, or cryptoware? If I don’t keep up with language changes, I may miss new resources as the language used to describe them changes completely and I fail to keep up.

I may be stuck in Ick Limbo today, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be productive. And if I do a good job, you’ll see it reflected in ResearchBuzz.

Now where’s that box of tissue….