Blogging

Just found this sorta funny (via skagirlie).

Blaise Cronin (an MLS professor) posted a “Dean’s notes” article about blogs in his college’s SLIS News.

The funny part? You can subscribe to the RSS feed. So - when he asks “Why do they choose to they [sic] expose their unremarkable opinions”? … is he asking himself that question???

And of course, his last line - “Librarians, of course, know better.” My question - I wonder if he knows he’s just been Punk’d (translation - unintentionally complained about blogs via an RSS feed, a close cousin to blogs)?

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Update: I just added the print css style to my blogger template, and it works just fine. Now Walt and others can print my blog in a much cleaner manner! Thanks to Bill Drew for some guidance on where to put the style tags, and to Walt for pointing Bill’s post out to me.

A few days ago, I commented on Walt Crawford’s post about the printability of blogs. Well, alot has happened in a few days! For starters, Walt left a good comment on my post - here’s what he had to say:

“I mostly print for #3–and, let’s face it, I’m just not as evolved as you are when it comes to computer use: The procedures you use leave me scratching my head. Besides that, I find that when I’m working on an essay or overview, contemplating the source material in print form, away from the computer, is frequently an important step. For me, not necessarily for you.”

Good point - people do things differently. One should definitely go with what works for him/her.

“Printing from the aggregator is OK if people provide full-text feeds (some don’t), although aggregators don’t do wonderful jobs either–but feeds with comments included along with full text are relatively rare, and sometimes that’s what I need.”

More good points. Aggregator printing is dandy IF there’s a full-text feed. Otherwise, you still have to visit the actual blog’s website. And the whole feeds-with-comments-and-fulltext thing - the only one I know of (if I’m thinking correctly) is Free Range Librarian. I like how her blog shows up in Bloglines - whenever someone leaves a comment, I get the updated post-with-comment. Very cool.

“I do use Bloglines email to get around printability problems sometimes…which is a pretty baroque way to get a simple listing!”

Emailing a blog post to yourself as a way to get around poor or no print options…

“Note that Bill Drew seems to have a simple fix for Blogger print problems. Inspired by that same essay. “

Wow! I’m going to give this one a shot. This is what I like about blogging - Walt posted thoughts, others commented, and POW! there’s now a solution (at least for blogger folks). Pretty fast, too.

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Walt Crawford recently wrote a very interesting article about the printability of blogs. Some of what he said I generally agree with, and some of what he said made me think (ultimately a good thing, too). Here’s what I’m thinking:

Thought #1: Reasons to print a blog post:

Walt gave four very valid reasons to print a blog post. Interestingly, when I read those reasons, I realized I do something very different than what was mentioned:

1. They want to read the content and it’s more than a few paragraphs long [possibly including comments on your entry].

I generally don’t print long blog posts - I read them online. But then, I also read ebooks on my PDA.

2. What you say is worth repeating. People want to save it to cite elsewhere.

and

3. What you say is valuable—interesting or lasting enough that people want to save it for future reference or rereading.

I sometimes print documents when I want to highlight sections, or save it for a work project (usually a Word document). And I have been known to print articles that I have found via the web (even short stories from time to time). But usually, if I want to remember something that I have read on the web, I will either: A. copy/paste the relevant text into a “remember this” file, or B. I will save it to my Furl account, complete with an electronic clipping of the relevant content. This way, I can access it anywhere, I don’t have to carry around paper, and if the page disappears, I still have my content clip.

4. They’ve been away from the blog for a while and would just as soon catch up in print form, reading a paper copy of recent entries.

Makes sense. Probably easier, too - especially if you’re away from a computer/handheld. And some people just prefer paper. But honestly, if I am playing catch-up with a blog I don’t aggregate, I just skim through the posts online. Doing that works for me, but not everyone!

Thought #2: My Blog or Your RSS Reader?

The other thought I had focuses on the RSS feed of a blog. I’d guess that most people reading my blog don’t actually visit my blog “in person.” Instead, an RSS spider visits my blog and takes my content back to their RSS Reader. At that point, the question of printability has left my blog and falls on their RSS Reader.

So Another question should be asked: “Do RSS Readers honor Walt’s printability challenge?” Honestly, I’m not sure. I use Bloglines to read blogs, and I don’t think it passes Walt’s test - everything prints in a skinny column on the right-hand side of the page. But then, that’s only one aggregator. Others (I’m guessing the desktop-based aggregators?) possibly have built-in controls like setting font size and style preferences, and end up printing more like a Word document prints.

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The current edition of InfoWorld has an article about enterprise blogging, or blogging within or for a company. The article has some great quotes and ideas:

Definitions:

• “Blogs and wikis play opposite roles… blogs are based on an individual voice; a blog is sort of a personal broadcasting system. Wikis, because they give people the chance to edit each other’s words, are designed to blend many voices.”
• “Reading a blog is like listening to a diva sing, reading a wiki is like listening to a symphony.”
• “A blog is like a presentation. It’s a one-to-many form of communication: a single person speaking to an audience who can comment on, but not change, the content.”
• On wikis: “Think of it as a huge whiteboard, one where everyone has a marker and is welcome to scribble.”

Also discussed is what a blog meant for the public does for a company: it gives the company direct interaction with readers. Is that cool, or what? Switch that wording around just a tad, and you get this: A blog meant for library customers gives the library direct interaction with readers. How’s that for reaching out?

Moving on - the corporate blogger needs to walk a fine line between sharing the good stuff while not sharing too much (i.e., company secrets). Here’s an interesting quote: “I believe that companies will soon start assigning specific people with good communication skills to public blogs intended for specific audiences.” That makes sense in a library setting, too. You want someone who falls between sounding like a press release and sounding incoherant. Someone who sounds like a real, yet intelligent, person.

On using internal, company-only blogs. These are meant to share company information and projects among employees. Listen to this: “we’ve seen people using blogs to diary their daily experiences using a new technology or building a new kind of system, monitored by others as a sort of real-time virtual apprenticeship, which lets them observe events as they unfold and see the issues that arise and how they are addressed.”

Also mentioned in a few sidebars: JotSpot, Movable Type, TWiki, and SocialText. Very good article - check it out!

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I was just thinking about the topic of this post last night, and then read Michael Stephens post today - he mentions something extremely similar. Bloggers must have a group mentality sometimes.

He apparently spoke with Stephen Abrams, who said “a blogger can have a voice in the LIS blogosphere from the smallest, most remote library in the world and still reach a huge audience…” And this was exactly what I was thinking about last night (ok, I’m a techie. So sue me).

I was mulling over a few things, actually. Meredith at the Information Wants to Be Free blog posted that someone she met with read her blog. I have had that same experience, and have realized that I don’t really have to write articles, speak at conferences, etc - I can do the exact same thing using my blog. I can write whole articles and post them. I can do a Powerpoint and talk over it using something like Camtasia Studio, and aggregate them. And if those ideas are good ones (and I make sure my posts can be found in search engines), other information professionals will read them.

That said, I still plan on writing articles and speaking at conferences - I’m really getting a kick out of the interaction that comes face to face. But still, it makes you wonder…

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I must have “arrived” somewhere, because an information company sent me a press release last week, and asked if I could post it on my blog. How cool is that? I can see their contact list now: Library Journal, InfoToday, Journal of Academic Librarianship, and [ahem] Dave’s Blog. Hee!

But it also made me think - bloggers, especially “niche” bloggers like I am (librarian/techie/web blogger) really need to have some sort of “goal” or guidelines for his/her blog. I think my general techie-focus works for now, but maybe in some future time, as my blog grows, I’ll need to create some sort of “blogger’s press release policy” for my blog? Not sure.

By the way, I’m not posting this particular press release. It doesn’t really match the fuzzy goals for my blog. But continue to send ‘em! I might just post one yet.

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Greg at Open Stacks posted a great post about content and podcasting, prompted in part by Michael’s post.

I was chatting with Michael today about a similar topic… and when I read Greg’s post, I thought I’d share some thoughts. Greg supplies some good pointers - here’s the two I want to focus on:

1. If you provide regularly-updated textual content, provide an RSS feed.
2. If you provide regularly-updated media content, audio/video/whatever, provide a podcast feed.

All this - RSS for text, podcasting and video podcasting for media, Tivo for television is Content Aggregation. Greg argues that the term “podcast” isn’t maybe the best term, and I’d agree with that. And probably “aggregation” isn’t the best term, either. But it IS one term that describes what’s going on - someone writes text, records audio or video, and makes that available for other people. Then, anyone can “subscribe” to the feed and get new content (video, audio, text, etc… whatever etc would actually be). And then the content can be absorbed, scanned, studied, ripped apart, or deleted when it’s convenient for the (uh-oh) “End User.” So all you’re really doing, then, is “subscribing” to “content.”

It’s up to us librarians to figure out what our content is, and how to provide our customers the ability to aggregate that content.

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Greg’s Blog Person web button is hilarious! Also, Michael says “I am loathe to link just to the LJ piece… other suggestions?”

How about someone making up a page/post with all the relevant links - one to the silly article that started it, and then to all the posts, articles, etc that discuss it…

That would achieve a couple of things - 1. it would give us something better to link to, 2. it would privide “the whole story,” so other people could make their own judgement about the whole enchalada, and 3. it would probably STILL make the word “blogs” appear when someone searched for Gorman’s name in google (from a comment on Michael’s blogpost that I found pretty funny)…

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