All 101 training participants will be having fun and learning.
Learning Objectives
Skills Practice
Experience Sharing
Resources
is for Furl , from Look-Smart (remember them?). It's kind of like an online filing cabinet that lets you save, store, and share Web pages of interest. As with del.icio.us, you can get an RSS feed of the most popular items that people are currently Furling.
annotate, and share web pages. Topics are used to categorize saved sites, similar to the tagging feature of other social websites. Additionally, a user may write comments, save clippings, assign each bookmark a rating and keywords (which are given greater weight while searching), and have an option of private or public storage for each topic or item archived.
Our discussions of blogs would be incomplete without pointing to our very own HCPLC teen blog. It was created a year ago and published in time to celebrate the first Teen Tech Week. Updated faithfully by a dedicated team of librarians and LTAs, it provides comments on just about everything that might interest teens in our community including the results of the Gaming Tournament Qualifier Events.
Following up on Andrew's post, quite a lot, maybe all, of the professional journals we read already have seriously invested in the 2.0 world. Blogs, and e-newsletters are common now, and so much more timely than the print journals, especially if you get them routed through the system. I often find that by the time I get a journal I have already read the news, and sometimes the articles, online. Lately even the reviews are becoming available. Lots of the content, however, is exclusive to the web. Book Group Buzz is a Booklist blog that is really valuable if you run, or participate in, a book club.
Darien Library has lots of blogs, btw. They have a consistent look and are all for the public as well as staff. I particularly like their book blog, and the ones for children and young adults. And their community blog is a great service. Even their director blogs.
That's what Marcus Banks thinks. Take a look at his latest blog entry on the subject.
He's became firmly convinced that the traditional journal model is antiquated for sharing research and knowledge among librarians. A better course is to develop and nurture excellent blogs, with multimedia capabilities and guaranteed preservation of the postings. This could be an entirely new blog that starts from scratch, or an established journal that evolves into a blog.
What do you think?
Have you found lots of great blogs to read? In our next lesson we'll talk about how to keep all this good stuff under control, but for now, in case you have not yet found a few blogs of interest to you, let me tell you about Technorati. This is a website that tracks blogs, 112.8 million of them to date. Here's a bit about blogs in general from Technorati:
A blog, or weblog, is a regularly updated journal published on the web. Some blogs are intended for a small audience; others vie for readership with national newspapers. Blogs are influential, personal, or both, and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them.
Blogs are powerful because they allow millions of people to easily publish and share their ideas, and millions more to read and respond. They engage the writer and reader in an open conversation, and are shifting the Internet paradigm as we know it.
On the World Live Web, bloggers frequently link to and comment on other blogs, creating the type of immediate connection one would have in a conversation. Technorati tracks these links, and thus the relative relevance of blogs, photos, videos etc. We rapidly index tens of thousands of updates every hour, and so we monitor these live communities and the conversations they foster.
The World Live Web is incredibly active, and according to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.
You can take a look at the most popular blogs according to Technorati right here.
And here are just a couple of interesting blogs I am sharing today.
At the Darien Library, the public service staff have their own blog that they are encouraged to post to, The Front Desk Speaks. I love this recent post.
If you are having a stressful day, try a one minute meditation at this very unusual blog, Moments of Rest.
Yes, that's right - there are already 59 blogs linked to hcplc=Lib 2.0! You still have until next Monday to get your blog created to be able to fully participate in the remaining training sessions - don't forget to send the URL in a comment to the workbook section #3 - Blogs & Blogging.
Do blogs really have global reach? Sure they do. Just check out a comment on Julie Troupe's very first blog posting on her Storytime Staples blog...she mentions using the book "One Frog Sang" and the author of the book - Shirley Parenteau -left a really great comment.
I guess you could say - "One Blog Sang."
How's your blogging?
There are many free online Image Storing and File Sharing sites:
This past week we’ve read posts and articles which have discussed the many varieties of blogs and how they fit into the landscape of social networking. David Weinberger mentions in his article, Libraries in the Age of Social Knowledge, that successful social networking sites provide social objects, items that the group can share, talk about and build relationships around. Blogs can be included in the discussion of social knowledge even though they tend to be written by one person because they still offer the social functionality of comment fields. The social object Weinberger refers to in this article is knowledge. Yes, we could start a totally new discussion on whether people are sharing information or knowledge, but for the sake of this post I will refer to the social objects being shared as knowledge.
Weinberger goes on to say that libraries have many virtues but treating books as social objects is not one of them. A library book is passed from one person to another, in serial fashion, intact. You are penalized for making the book your own by, say, highlighting passages or writing in the margins, no matter how smart your annotations are…Because libraries have been physical spaces, this has made perfect sense. Your book mark-up, no matter how smart, distracts others. Your jabbering away in one of the library’s reading room disturbs other. That’s just how space and matter work.
How can libraries compete or even keep up with the social exchange of knowledge? Should we even compare our printed materials to blogs and other knowledge sharing tools? I don’t think we have a choice. Libraries will have to continually examine their role in the exchange of knowledge if we are to remain relevant in this digitized, networked world.
Weinberger ends on a very positive and encouraging note when he asserts: As works of knowledge become more and more social, we will still need humans staying one step ahead, guiding us with greater wisdom than the works themselves can muster. Those are our librarians.
Here's two books that should get you thinking about blogs:
Incorporate the hottest new Web technologies into your blog! How to Do Everything with Your Web 2.0 Blog makes it easy to choose the blogging tools that are best for you and master the basics of blog design and template manipulation. You'll learn how to add different Web 2.0 services to your blog, including images, video, audio, forums, tags, wikis, and even money-making features. It's time to take your blog to the next level and get more hits, more fans, more friends, and more customers.
*Learn about different blogging tools, including Blogger, TypePad, WordPress, and ExpressionEngine
*Customize your blog's design by editing templates and style sheets
*Share your blog headlines and story feeds via RSS and Atom
*Add photos, video, and audio--including podcasts--to your blog
*Drive traffic to your site with tagging, social bookmarking, and ranking services
*Collaborate with users through wikis
*Promote visitor participation using forums, community blogs, and newsletters
*Make money through your blog with Google AdSense, Amazon, and other affiliate programs
*Track, optimize, maintain, and back up your blog.
Maybe you have started your own blog (lots of you have, congratulations!), or maybe you are just thinking about it. One way to get started is by reading other blogs. Certainly read those of your friends and colleagues, but there are so many more you might want to take a look at, visit regularly, add to a newsreader. (I know, I know, that's the next lesson.)
Anyway, here are some blogs for you to consider reading, commenting on, subscribing to.
It's official, libraries and blogging go together. Check out the Library of Congress blog.
The librarians aren't the only ones in Washington blogging. Yes indeed, here is The Hill's Congress Blog (where lawmakers come to blog).
This one is a wiki, but I just want to point out that lots of public libraries are blogging away.
Since you work in the library there is a good chance you love books. Even if you aren't into creating your own personal library on LibraryThing, you may want to get into the LibraryThing blog.
Stay on top of local happenings with Sticks of Fire.
You can also stay current on Tampa, and the world at large, by reading newspaper blogs. There are so many to choose from, here are blogs from The St. Petersburg Times, The Tampa Tribune, and the newspaper of record, The New York Times. What a wealth of information and conversation! More opinionated, and often more interesting, than the articles in the newspapers.
If you still want to know some more about this blog stuff, here are a couple of blog entries you can read.
How Blogs Work is an entry on a blog called How Stuff Works.
And you can Learn More about Blogs and Blogging on this entry into the Discovery Series on a blog called Library Stream.
Now get blogging!
Today we are starting workbook section #3 - Blogs & Blogging in the hcplc=Lib 2.0 training.
Don't worry if you haven't created your blog yet, you have another two weeks. Take a look at the "hcplc=Lib 2.0 Participants" area on the training blog - 48 of your eager colleagues have already created a blog and are posting.
Here are the Top Blogging sites in December, 2007 (from Nielsen Media Research):
Learning Objectives
Skills Practice
Experience Sharing
Resources
is for del.icio.us, "social bookmarking" for the great unwashed (e.g., everybody else). This is the 1,000-pound gorilla of social bookmarking sites (for some reason, I always have trouble spelling this one). If you're a voyeur or just want to make sure you don't miss anything cool/interesting/useful, snag the RSS feed from the front page to see what people are bookmarking right now. del.icio.us is part of the Yahoo! family of sites, along with Flickr, the iconic Web 2.0 photo-sharing site.
del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's. You can use del.icio.us to:
