The final post…

Well I suppose this is better late than never!  After a few bumps with my computer melt down and internet ups and downs I think I’m ready to conclude my thoughts on Social Software.

It’s hard to say which tool I enjoyed the most because they each have their purpose and are useful in their own ways.  On a personal and professional  note I throughly enjoyed Blogs, Wikis and Social Bookmarking.  In terms of Blogs I think I really liked its purpose for a distance course and would like to see more courses make use of them, though I’m not sure I recommend wordpress, due to its speed and strange frusterating quirks.  I’m eager to get blogging with my collegues at work as we have a large group of individuals interested in the use of Social Software Tools in our corporate environment.  As for blogging on a personal level, like an online journal, not so much for me! 

As for the wiki, again I am very excited to get this off the ground at work and start making use of it.  We focus alot of our work around policy and standards development and I think using a wiki as a stomping ground for SME’s (subject matter experts) to collaborate and work on specific policies there are many benifits to using wiki technologies.  Further, we are continuously creating glossaries, and acronym lists and this again would be a great forum to conduct this sort of develompment work.

As for Social Bookmarking, this is something I’ve already got people hooked on and I’m quite excited about it!  I’ve got them using delicious as a piolot experiment at the moment.  Many of us are constantly doing research and often our topics overlap.  Now we’re sharing resources in a much more condusive way (no long sending random links via email).  The meta tagging or folksonomy ability has been my biggest selling feature.

As for what could have been done better in terms of this course, i have tried to think of something but I simply can’t.  I was very pleased with the way we incorporated all of the tools we talked about and put them to use in a practical way.  The case studies along with the readings really grounded the topics for me.

All in all this was a fantastic couse and I would most certainly recommend it to upcomming students!

 Thanks everyone for a great term, interesting comments/discussions and an opportunity to try all the things I wanted to but didn’t have time to test before this course.  I think I now spend 25% more time on my computer now though! hahaha  But I believe its for the greater good of communication in the new age!

Happy Holidays! 

Cheers!!

Random post — 28 Days Till Christmas!! – Online Xmas Lists

This is somewhat random yet somewhat relevant (and I apologize if someone else has already discussed this as I’m a little behind on commenting but working my way towards catching up!)

Okay so: Your Christmas List online – social networking for Santa?  My sister who is rather addicted to social software tools has recently circulated her online xmas list to our family so we are ever so prepared for her xmas needs this year J (Recall my sister is the one who only uses the library reference service through IM and only as a absolute last resort uses the archaic form of communication called the telephone!)  Anyway, I think its kinda fun and thought I’d toss it out there for those of you who are interested to take a look and comment if your up to it! 

Back to catch up & final paper for me!

Cheers!

Week 7 Tools: blinklist, citeulike, & connotea

I started to take a look at these social bookmarking tools in the order they were posted.  My initial response to BlinkList, was ‘WOW this seems easy’.  It told me right away what it can do, it gave me a brief idea of how exactly it worked and it offered a more in-depth tour showing in greater detail how it works.  I thought it was great that it had a specific section geared towards those teaching classes and “what BlinkList can do for you!” and your class.  They made getting started quite easy but if you weren’t sold on its ease, they show you samples of Resent activity, and let you click on some popular tags to see what it will look like.  I checked out the link to the Web2.0 tag from the main page, and I liked how it was sorted by tabs for “most recent”, “Hot Now”, and “Popular”.  I also liked how it shows you a star rating, based on votes, and a screen shot of the actual website.  Sign up was as easy as it said it was, and importing my browser favorites easy.  The step by step “how to” was straightforward, clear and appreciated.  I haven’t imported my del.icio.us files as yet, I want to give BlinkList a test run before I make any decisions to import everything and choose one bookmarking tool. 

The main page of CiteULike wasn’t quite as appealing as BlinkList, however it clearly stated the purpose of the tool, what it can do for you, and really focused on citation aspects, as well as the academic community.  It felt more serious, more professional, and a little less fun, but it seemed like a worthy enough tool for a test run.  Just like BlinkList it gives you a list of the most popular tags in the right hand tool bar.  Their presentation of tags was quite neat, as it displayed the tags in a random scattering, with the most popular sized accordingly, the way extisp.icio.us did for our own del.icio.us tags.  Further because of its rather professional tone and appearance, the tags seemed quite academic and relevant.  The site, while it was not wild and crazy and terribly exciting, it did have reasonable navigation and it was quite obvious and easy to use.  Just as BlinkList it provided sample posts and articles so you could get a taste before you signed up.  Once I signed up I was disappointed to find (at least from my quick investigation) that I could not import/export from my del.icio.us or browser favorites quite as easily as I could from BlinkList.  From my quick browse through, it seemed that I could only easily import/export from BibTeX (free) or EndNote (commercial).  However, that aside posting an article was quite easy, and searching an article was even easier.  I like the ability to mark it “very likely to read” or “might read”, etc. on its way in, and I like the ability to let the article posted be public but to keep the notes portion private if you so choose.  I think this tool definitely lends itself well to academic research because of its compatibility with BibTeX, etc. and it defiantly makes obtaining citations quite easy.    Connotea’s site was a little livelier than CiteULike, and a little busier than BlinkList, however it was straightforward and walked you through the steps of registering and how it works relatively well.  I like that it listed the top 5 reasons to use Connotea, but you have to click separate tabs to read about Connotea, latest news, site guide, community pages, etc.  I think I would have liked to taste a few more of its features right from the main page.  As for the registration process it asked for more personal information than just a user name and email address.  This site wants to know your first and last name (which will “not be seen by other users”)…hmmm interesting…I wonder why they need/want this when the others don’t….   

Connotea also made you wait for the verification email before you could log in and start using it.  The others didn’t require that you wait for it they let you get started but told you everything you need for future log in would be in your email.  So far I’m not nearly as impressed by Conntea as I was with BlinkList and CiteULike.  Even once I got my registration email and I logged in, I didn’t find the navigation of the site was as intuitive as the others.  I’ll keep the account for now but it will definitely be on probation. My final vote goes to BlinkList for easy navigation, straight forward explanations, and it was even a little fun.  However, CiteULike is a close second due to its implications for academic research and easy citation.  And unless in the next week or so Connotea captivates me it’s not ranking so high J.

Feed2JS vs RSS2HTML

Feed2JS (aka Feed to JavaScript) “just a cut ‘n paste away” you say?  No knowledge of XML you say?  This was a great site, I loved the “why are you doing this?” section, straight to the point. I liked how the instructions were written in plain English with minimal technical jargon and the step by step explanations were clear.  The RSS2HTML site was a little more serious and scary than Feed2JS.  It gets right to the point, option 1, option 2, alternatives, no explanations, no easing into it.  While the instructions were clear it was a bit overwhelming for someone new to all of this. Even though I’m using wordpress and you can add a feed using the “add a sidebar widget” option, I tried out Feed2JS and it created a JavaScript cut and past for me in seconds!  It was really easy to use but I couldn’t figure out where to paste the script it had generated in my wordpress blog to make it work.  Thanks to Heather who I messaged and called in a panic, I realized with wordpress you have to use their tool.  How does it work for those of you using blogs other than wordpress? 

I choose a feed from KMworld (great site!) that is related to what I hope to do for my final paper.  It worked relatively well but I’ve hit a stump!  The first problem is that KMworld asks that you link to their site as part of your RSS feed and you use their logo.  For the life of me I cannot figure out how to do this on word press.  If you check my link in the sidebar you’ll see the title link “www.kmworld.com” doesn’t work, the article links work just fine though.  The second problem is finding a way to include their logo.  Does anyone know how or is this even possible with wordpress? DIGRESSION à while I’m on the subject of HELP I can’t get wordpress to do what I want!  I thought I’d throw this in and see what everyone has to say: a while ago I said I’d look into adding an about page with a picture.  I went through the steps and filled that section out using the wordpress templates but I can’t figure out how to get it to show up!  Any suggestions as to what I’m missing or doing wrong would be great!!

Week 5: More RSS business

I really liked the Rich Site Services: Web Feeds for Extendd Information and Library Services article.  While there was a lot of overlap with the information read on RSS feeds last week, this article clearly lists a number of uses for RSS feeds as an information services.  I’m quite excited about the E-Journal feeds now.  There are so many Library Journals and Information Management Journals that I would love to follow but it is a painful task when you have to go to each site regularly.  Being able to aggregate all the journal feeds in my Bloglines account (which I’m loving more and more everyday now that I’m in the swing it) will make my life so much easier and increase the likelihood of reading them more regularly.  The section of the article which I found particularly interesting was the discussion of “Potential Possibilities” and ways for publishers and vendors to get on board and make the RSS feeds and even more valuable tool for libraries.  The article also talked about the idea of database and OPAC vendors offering a web feed option.  In fact we saw a library catalogue in our case study from last week that had a library catalogue search with RSS feed options. 

The Weblogs and RSS in Information Work article considers weblogs as more than a professional awareness service instead it considers them an information resource as a library services.  The article discussed how weblogs and RSS feeds used together can be a more enhanced service than weblogs alone.  The footnote that directs you to the Blogarama blog directory was pretty neat and really easy to use.  

I also liked the quote, “so technically there is no reason for an organization of whatever size not to blog – the ease of use means contributions don’t have to be limited to those with great IT confidence, and in some organizational blogs the content can come from a range of people.”  This is what I’ve been saying at work over the last few weeks that we’ve been contemplating the use of blogs as a collaboration and knowledge management tool. 

Oh and Heather after reading this article I think I better understand what you were saying about “TOO MUCH EMAIL” and I am now re-thinking my idea of having the news feeds for my IM Issues publication coming to my inbox Heather you were right and this article backs you up, “some aggregators can alert you by email when there is new material available. This is fine for saved searches and some blogs, but not recommended for rapidly changing sites like BBC news! Indeed it’s too easy to get overwhelmed by material when you just add one more source that looks interesting, and then another. And if you miss checking for a few days you could have hundreds of items to look at…” I can see how it would be very overwhelming for news feeds so I think I’ll stick to the Bloglines approach. 

The Success Story: RSS Moves into the Mainstream at the University of Alberta Libraries article was good as it gave an overview of the typical uses of blogs and RSS in libraries.  My only complaint about the article is that when he referenced Amanda’s blogwithoutalibrary.net he didn’t link to it, or any of the other sites he mentions!  I think I’m a lazy reader and if it hadn’t been the blog of someone I know I doubt I would have taken the time to copy and past the link into a new window (which is what I had to do).  Sorry for the mini, un-related to the topic at hand, rant J 

Bloglines, Flickr, and del.icio.us make RSS delectable – Well I was pretty excited to read this article as it had an eye catching title.  And as it turns out the read was as good as its title!  I was particularly interested in the standalone newsreader flaw they point out:  

“There are various standalone newsreader programs available for pretty much any computing platform. Some are quite good, but they all share the same flaw: information about what feeds you subscribe to and which articles you have read stays on your individual computer. What if you use the Web both at home at at work? How do you synchronize your feed-reading experience? …While it is true that some standalone newsreaders have this feature, it only works with the same software on each system. What if your office system is Linux and your home machine is a Mac? You’re out of luck.)” 

I have to ask why would you want a standalone reader then?  What is the benefit if you can get a web-based reader like Bloglines, etc. and read it anywhere there is an internet connection? 

When the article started talking about Flickr I also got excited because it is something I am about to get started on so I can share my wedding planning progress with our friends and family.  We have engagement party picks, dress picking shots, and soon we’ll have Jack & Jill photos, bachelor & bachelorette party photos, and of course most importantly the Wedding photos!  This is the one I’ve heard the most about any feedback on a better tool for this purpose would be more than welcomed J The article states some of the downfalls as: 

“By default all pictures are public, so a Flickr search returns all your photos tagged “newyork” as well as all the photos others have tagged “newyork””.  

“…it is still in beta. While it works well, the site does go down from time to time. Second, the free Flickr membership is limited to 10MB of picture uploads a month. That’s a lot of little cameraphone pictures, but only a handful of full-size digital camera photos. If you are using a “real” digital camera, you should scale down the pictures before uploading them. Also, you can only see your last 100 uploaded pictures (older pictures are stored but not accessible unless you upgrade your account).” 

“The real power of Flickr is available if you upgrade to a Pro account for $60 per year. The Pro account has an upload limit of 1GB per month, and gives you access to your original full-size images. When you upload pictures to Flickr, they are automatically scaled to a variety of sizes for display. The largest size you can access with a free account is 640×480 pixels. If you have a Pro account, your original image remains available. This makes Flickr a great place to archive all your digital images, not just ones you plan on sharing with others.” 

So I guess the bottom line is you get what you pay for when its free and you get what you pay for when you pay for it   Oh and before we end the Flickr discussion, if you don’t know anything about flickr this article provides the link to a sample flickr photostream. 

I think its pretty awesome that every photstream has a corresponding RSS feed.  2 of my very good friends one in Manitoba and one in
Ottawa have recently had kids.  I’ve been out of the loop and wait patiently for the occasional emailed update photo, or for the hardcopies to arrives weeks later in the mail.  I talked to them at the end of the summer about getting a Flickr account and now I can see the pics almost as soon as they take them.  Now all I have to do is get them linked into my bloglines account!! 

 

The section on “Bookmarks the easy way”, made me say “wow this author is reading my mind today!”  He says, “like everyone else, I have saved many bookmarks in my browsers over the years, only to forget I’d ever saved them” – this is exactly why I can’t stop talking about del.icio.us I’ve got my sister going on it now for her essay articles, my fiancé is now using it heavily at work and at home and I am growing to love it more and more everyday J  I even have one person in my network now thanks Heather!  Why do I love it more and more you may ask?  Well how I can’t tell you how many times I’ve bookmarked something at work, something at home, and something at my parents place and when I needed I’m never at the right PC.  Because it’s web-based and I’m rarely in the same place day to day it has made a world of difference!  GOSH I shoulda been checking these things our waaaaaaaaaaayyyy before this class!

Week 4 Case Studies: RSS & the Library

Kansas City Public Library presented their RSS feeds as Subject Guide.  Their list was straight forward and the feeds were broken into a categories so you can select was is most relevant to you.  The Movies & TV Guide was pretty fun.  The How Do I Guide seemed useful but I’m not sure I’d need an RSS feed for all the new How Do I’s that come out.  The standard Libraries Guide section was as always interesting and useful for staying on top of what other libraries are up to, and especially useful for LIS students J

Hennepin County Library’s feeds were pretty good but the layout of the page was a bit confusing. For example the Book Lists feed looked like it would take you to another page before providing the RSS feed but it goes straight to the RSS XML feed, so you’d have to subscribe to the feed before previewing what it offers.  I couldn’t figure out how to subscribe to the Catalogue Search Feed at first.  The description of the feed says you can but I didn’t see the RSS/FEED button at the bottom of the initial search page.  It wasn’t until I clicked on one of the results that you see the RSS button.  This makes sense but it wasn’t intuitive at first and the description didn’t make it clear.

The NHMCCD custom feeds seemed pretty standard, however it was nice that clicking on the link showed you a sample of the current contents of the feed, allowing you to choose from another list of narrowed feeds under the given subject.

Tacoma public library also had pretty standard feeds, upcoming events, broken into children’s events and upcoming events in general.  There were feeds for holiday/closure schedules and new arrival feeds broken into categories so you can get current information about only what you really want.

University of Oklahoma Libraries RSS feeds again seemed to have the standard components on News & Announcements, New Books, and New Electronic Resources.  You were not taken to another page before you clicked the RSS button, which I think would have been kind of nice, but at the same time listing the RSS feeds this way seemed clean and straight forward.  It was also standard in that it had links and explanations of what RSS is and how to use it, and like all the other sites it had links to RSS readers/aggregators.

Western Kentucky University also had a very clean looking presentation of their RSS feeds.  It was very clear from their main page what has and RSS feed and what does not. You can click on links and go to a page on Announcements and view them or you can click on the RSS link and get the RSS subscription URL without going first to the page.

I am really starting to get into and understand RSS feeds, but you can only subscribe to so many before it’s not better than visiting all the sites.  I don’t have very many feeds added to my bloglines account beyond the ones for this course and sometimes I find it hard to keep up!  So I guess you just have to decide what’s appropriate to have as a feed (how often do you need to be updated) and what is appropriate to visit occasionally.  How are you guys deciding what you add as a feed and what you don’t?  I’d love to add feeds like mad but the reality is that I’d never get to read them all!

Rojo VS Netvibes: Netvibes All the Way

I can’t say, after poking around and registering a test/play account with Rojo, I’d make the switch from Bloglines to Rojo as my aggregator.  Now I may be out of the loop and I may have missed out on finding and understanding the “unique” features Rojo boasts, but I found it more difficult and confusing to use than Bloglines.  Adding new feeds beyond the feeds they added for me upon registration, was not an easy task by any means.  Rojo claims to have been selected as the “best of the Web” for blog reading by the Editors of Business Week, but I’m not sure how.  I admit I’m very new to this RSS business but I’d like to think that with some good help screens I’d be able to make it work for me, unfortunately it did not and my vote is that it is user UN-friendly.  Their help menu didn’t have a search option and the bits it offered you were frustrating!  I visited the “Feed Reading 101” section and after clicking the “Subscribing to Feeds” link I was ultimately lead to an Error screen.  Then because I was in the help section I had a terrible time trying to navigate my way back to My Feeds.  When you click on home it doesn’t take you back your Feeds it takes you to a welcome screen prompting you to sign up again, so you don’t know if your still signed in or if you have to log in again!  You have to click on the sub-link under the home link “visit rojo.com” before you can see your feeds again.  Maybe reading the feeds in Rojo is nice but I wouldn’t know I was so frustrated at this point that because I couldn’t add my own feeds that I had no interest reading the feeds they signed me up for.  The display screen looked reasonable but all in all I felt Rojo was a very frustrating experience for me and it would be very unlikely for me to visit it again.  I will now have to find out how to cancel the account if its possible, but I’ll need to leave that for another day when I’m not as aggravated

WOW Netvibes was so different from Rojo.  It was fun to look at, easy to use, and sign up was simple.  You can edit each of the windows right there to show your feed in a news page format that you can click and edit instantly!  Adding a feed took me 2 seconds and I didn’t even have to hunt around in help to figure it out!  Definitely user friendly and I will definitely keep the test account I set up!  You can link your Gmail account, add photos, and so much more haha!  I don’t have as much to say about Netvibes as Rojo but everything I do have to say is positive!  I really enjoyed this one.

Week 4 Reading Response: RSS

Before starting the course I took a few minutes to read the Wikipedia article on RSS, and while it was good, after the readings this week I have to ask, where have the RSS tutorials been all my life?   RSS for job post tracking!  This would have been so useful at the beginning of the summer when my Fiancé was looking for work.  I can’t tell you how many websites we needed to remember to go to regularly to see what was new.  I’m glad I know about it now for the future, I love learning new ways to make my life easier J  Speaking of which the weather tracking from the Weather Channel is pretty sweet too!  Since I’m in London and Toronto we need to check the weather for both places every morning, now I can just get notified!  This would have also been quite useful before our vacation this past summer, we were following the weather in Vegas to see what we needed to pack but each time we needed to check it we had to do a new search, next time we’ll just let the RSS feed do all the work

Turning RSS into email, wow yet another brilliant idea!  I’m so sad that I’m just now getting on the RSS bandwagon!  Over the summer I was in charge of compiling and circulating an Information Management Issues publication.  Essentially I needed to scan the news to see what’s happening on the IM front with respect to Data Breaches, New Data Legislation, and Data Security Issues.  I had to sign up to a million email lists, groups, etc.  It would take the better half of a day to get through everything and it overwhelmed my inbox.  I’ve passed this project onto one of our co-op students for this term but I will certainly be talking with them about the benefits of using an RSS feed in general and turning some of these email groups into RSS feeds through Bloglines.  Even better is the “Prospective” web searching RSS ability.  This publication is going to get easier and easier with each new coop student!  The MSN Search with the RSS subscription option will be so handy, in combination with the Google News for this project and using an aggregator to keep it all straight will easily cut the research portion of the publication to a minimum.

Read on and you shall find the answers!  Cohen’s article or tutorial is a gold mine for advice on the best way to get current news for the project I discussed above.  I’m so excited that I’m getting a chance to use what I’m learning so immediately!  I know I said it before but it is just so exciting when your worlds come together J  Cohen’s other article, “RSS for Non-Techie Librarians”, was really good at explaining everything so easily.  I actually linked to it from the first tutorial I went too and saved it to my del.ic.ious account before I realized, it was also one of this weeks readings.

I really enjoyed Robin Good’s article, particularly the section where he “simplifies your task of evaluating and better understanding RSS”.  He summarized the key positive aspects of RSS feeds for email publishing & distribution.  This will help me build a case for its use in the IM Issues publication I’ve been ranting about this whole post.

Week 3 Case Study Comments and soooo much more ;)

I really liked the layout/organization of the Darien Library Blogs.  I found it easy to navigate, appreciated the “Latest Post” note underneath the Blog title, and the listing of each blog which was specific to a service, etc.  I had a look at the Darien Library Directors Blog and thought it was an excellent way for the busy directors to communicate directly with the public, making themselves more accessible to more people in the community.  It was timely, as blogs should be, and there was even a post that went up minutes after a morning meeting, followed by a comment moments later.  While it looked like it was used most often by the internal library staff as a forum of communication with the director it is accessible to anyone.  I found it a bit difficult to initially identify who was talking but was able to figure it out after clicking on a comment.  The only critique I’d make here is to make it clear who is posting, even if the audience is made up mostly of people who know you, there is a good chance someone like me or the general public may want to know who’s talking without digging.  Harping a bit on the Darien Library blog I have to say I enjoyed the way they used it to track, or in their own words Chronicle the progress towards a new Darien Library.  Though there were not many comments the option was there, and of the few comments some were humorous (I wonder if they’re moderated). 

I looked at each case in the order they were posted and the first thought I had when I got to the Garfield County Public Library blog was WOW that’s long, you scroll forever to get to the bottom!  The next thought I had was WOW so is mine!  So I’m going to get going on using my categories better and make sure that the posts are getting archived once the main page gets too long!  Okay back to
Garfield, I can’t say this blog did much for me.  It wasn’t clear to me until after I read the first few postings that we are dealing with an internal blog for staff members, I’m probably a little slow on the uptake and it may have been clear to everyone else, but it wasn’t to me L  I think the crazy amounts of scrolling you had to do to see everything on the main page was too much and overwhelming.  Can’t say I enjoyed this one.

However, I did enjoy the Lamson Library catalog of books and more.  While it suggested that it was underdevelopment I was thoroughly impressed.  If all catalogues were this fun more people would use them   I loved the reader reviews of the books, it was like Amazon without Amazon. The “find more like this” option and the “most popular” list made this a lot of fun and easy to spend more time than you planned on it.  I look forward to seeing how more libraries use this idea in the “next generation of library blogs”.

Okay they seem to get better and better (maybe they were intentionally ordered this way Amanda? )  I love the way the MabryOnline.org blogs are used to put students, parents, and teachers in contact.  I remember when the only way my parents got to talk to my teacher was on parent-teacher night and when I was in trouble and I can’t tell you how many nights we’d return from school, and when our parents asked you what you did you’d reply “nothing”.  With ever increasing home internet access this seems like a fantastic way to keep parents informed about what’s going on in the classroom, not to mention the ability to communicate in an open forum with the teacher and other parents on current issues as well as what’s happening in the classroom.

This is getting super long so I’ll be brief with the last two (oh the irony!).  St. Joseph County Public Library Gameblog was totally unexpected for a library, I know that sounds terrible coming form a librarian, but lets face it this is just too cool! I think this is definitely an innovative new way to bring the teens and the “tweens” back to the library scene, though it is a totally different capacity than expected.  It was also interesting to see that it was a multi-author blog, while I didn’t notice much difference from regular single author blogs (aside from two consistent voices).  So far my thoughts on multi-author blogs is that it is a fine idea so long as they authors are compatible, and I don’t mean they agree on everything.  So long as both authors follow the generally accepted “bloggers ethics” guidelines and clearly identify themselves.  Perhaps my views on multi-authors will change with further exposure to this type of blogging.  As for the VCU Libraries blog, I would chalk it up to be rather typical and practical.  Got a suggestion? Post it here, kinda stuff.  I’ll be interested to see what others have to say about this site in terms of “next generation library blogs”.

Week 3 Reading Response Continued: Ethical Blogging

Karen Schneider hears warning bells when she thinks of librarians and blog technology.  Do they really understand the new technology or is this to be the next “filtering wars” of the 90’s?  As Karen states, “the stakes are even higher, because we’re creating highly visible, globally available content.”  But maybe we don’t have to experience the “filtering wars” again, maybe all we need is a code of ethics, which for librarians should really be an extension of our existing ‘information best practices’.  As Karen suggests it is the librarians’ task to provide accurate, reliable, and unbiased information, regardless of the medium.  If we follow some common sense principles like: be conscientious of copyright (if you didn’t write it cite it or in the case of blogs link it!) and disclose the potential of all biases, and distinguish between opinions and fact, there may be hope of a future for libraries in the blogosphere.

Just a quick thought about disclosure of biases.  I got thinking about some of the articles from the first week, when we talked about learning more about yourself and your biases as you blog (I think it was another Rebecca Blood article).  What if you have biases that you are not aware of and you, unintentionally of course, project this into your blog without notifying your audience?  (Yes, I’m a tad paranoid.)  I suppose you’ll find out pretty quickly when your readers respond, but what about your “blogger reputation”? Well lucky for me I read on before I became too paranoid about my subconscious biases!  It’s so simple, when you’re wrong, ADMIT IT!  You will hurt your reputation less if you admit you were unaware of your bias, or if you change your stance, or you were down right wrong about something!  So there is always hope for saving face, so long as you blog ethically!  Okay so now we know how to save face, but how can we avoid the need to save face whenever possible?  Well, Rebecca Blood is so smart because she suggests writing each post as if it couldn’t be changed!  Imagine that, don’t treat it as “just a blog” like Schneider warns against, treat it as a final draft, don’t post it unless you are sure you won’t want to change it, and like Blood suggests don’t be sneaky either, don’t just go in and change a past post because you changed your mind, own up, fess up, talk about it in a new post!  That’s what these things are for right, conversation, and intellectual growth?

On another note, I was sad to find the cyberjournalist.net site was temporarily unavailable by the time I got to it.  Not only was it a posted reading but it was also a recommend link from Schnieders article L  Guess we’ll have to just keep watching to see when it is up again.

Last note for this post I swear!  I just finished reading the “Why and How to Use Blogs to Promote Your Library’s Services” article and it emphasizes in a number of places the importance of brevitiy for a library blog.  Haha it made me giggle because I just realized I an not going to be the worlds best blogger since brevity is something I’ve yet to master