Blogs! Blogs! Blogs!
Submitted by meredithfarkas on Mon, 2007-02-12 14:17.
Welcome to Week 1 of Five Weeks to a Social Library!
This week we will be focusing on blogs. If you asked someone four or five years ago what a blog was, they'd probably say it's an online diary primarily used by teenage girls to write about their lives. Times have certainly changed. Now, blogs are used by judges, Nobel Prize-winners, academics, CEOs, journalists, classroom teachers, Web developers, librarians and many more. And blogs are used in so many different ways, that it's hard to come up with a single definition to define the medium. The definition I like (which is rather basic) comes from Jill Walker in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory:
A weblog or blog is a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first.
Most importantly, libraries are using blogs; lots of them. Look at the Blogging Libraries Wiki and you will see that libraries in all areas are using blogs. There are so many ways that libraries can use blogs, both internally and to disseminate information to patrons. Here are just a few:
- Disseminate library news to patrons
- Get feedback from patrons/start a conversation
- Market library events and resources
- Readers' advisory
- Book reviews from teens or adults
- Online book club or online supplement to physical book club
- Subject guide or space for disseminating subject-specific information
- Course guide
- Staff information-sharing ("the printer at the reference desk is broken")
- Reference guide for staff ("I'm getting a lot of questions about green architecture at the desk. I used these resources to answer the questions..."
- Paperless notebook
- Resource guide for information literacy class or other educational program
- Tool for generating an RSS feed so that you can syndicate content elsewhere
What's On for This Week
Take a look at the content for Week 1. As you can see, this week you are going to have many opportunities to learn about blogs and have conversations about how they can be used in libraries. Obviously you have your weekly small group chats, but in addition, you have Webcasts, screencasts and opportunities to have discussions with those who created these presentations.
The first opportunity will be Tuesday at 11:00 am ET where you will have the chance to chat with Anne Welsh. Anne is the creator of the excellent presentation, From Writer's Block to Library Blog, that you should ideally take a look at before Tuesday. Anne will be making herself available in the chatroom in this Drupal classroom from 11am - 12pm ET to discuss her presentation.
Next is the live Webcast by Rebecca Hedreen on Tuesday at 7:00 pm ET, A 21st Century Printing Press: Blogs as Publishing Mechanism. Rebecca's talk will provide an excellent introduction to blogs. Rebecca is a distance learning librarian so she has had a lot of experience using social software to provide services to remote users online. This live Webcast, as well as all the others, will take place in OPAL. You should have received information on accessing our OPAL meeting room. If not please send us an e-mail at sociallibrary@gmail.com.
On Wednesday at 1:00 pm ET , you'll have the chance to chat with Karen Harker in the Drupal classroom. Karen's screencast, Duck Soup: Using a Blog to Provide Product Support, chronicles her library's experiences with blogs. It's definitely an interesting use of blogs, and one you may not necessarily have considered.
Thursday at 2:00 pm ET will be our second live Webcast. Nanette Donohue will be discussing how to make your library's blog a quality product with Next Steps: Taking Your Library’s Blog from So-So to Superb. Creating a blog is only step one; creating something that people will actually read is the difficult part!
Finally, on Friday at 3:00 PM ET, you will have the chance to chat about the Millennials with Jami Schwarzwalder, creator of the screencast, Using the Tools: How Millennials Use the World Wide Web. For those of you who work with the Millennials (born between 1980 and 2000), Jami is definitely someone you should chat with, as she has some really interesting insights into how this generation approaches technology.
Looks like we have an exciting week ahead of us!
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Take out "frequently
Take out "frequently updated" and you have the essential definition of a blog. There's nothing about a blog that implies or requires frequent updating.
You're absolutely right,
You're absolutely right, Walt. In fact, with the ability in some blog software to create pages, sometimes blogs are used as content management systems, which would actually not even meet the "dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order" criteria. Then again, is it really a blog at that point? It's still a good use of the software though. :)
I'll argue that, if the site
I'll argue that, if the site does not consist of dated entries in reverse chronological order, the site isn't a blog. It may be using blogging software as a lightweight CMS, but it's not a blog.
Which, I think, makes this brief conversation useful grist for your Five Weeks first-week mill: There's a difference between the tool (Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad--but also other tools that aren't "really" blog systems) and the application or site (most commonly a blog, but you can also use some blog software as lightweight CMS for non-blog applications).
As you know, I'm not part of the Five Weeks course, but I think this is great stuff, and will certainly be checking in from time to time. Congratulations to all.
Walt, Thanks and we look
Walt,
Thanks and we look forward to hearing from you from time to time. You always add something valuable to the conversation.
I think you can take out the
I think you can take out the "frequently," perhaps, but not the "updated." If someone uses blogging software to post 30 entries in one day and never touches it again, is it a blog?
I'd say that a blog needs to keep moving forward to live, like a shark.
Of course, one could think of all kinds of perverse ways to use blogging software that would result in a non-bloggy product. But I do think that "updated" is important, in the same way that a one-off broadside isn't a "newspaper."
<<I'd say that a blog needs
<<I'd say that a blog needs to keep moving forward to live, like a shark.>>
This made me laugh and could not be a better metaphor. Thanks, Steve.
Steve's probably right,
Steve's probably right, although that really only means that it takes two posts to constitute a blog. (And, hey, in high school I was part of a rebellion that resulted in a newspaper with only three issues, and I've seen journals with only two issues, so...) One-shots, of which there have probably been millions, are something else: ebroadsides? Dismal failures? Required class assignments? Blurts?
I'm thinking of a library-related blog that, as far as I know, has had a total of two posts since its inception: the usual "hello world" and one fairly long, fairly substantive post. I quote from that post in my next book. It's only been five months since that post, of course...so Jurassic--oops, the blogger--could come back to life any time. Hmm. Now that I think of it, there's another liblog with a hello-world post and an extremely snarky writeup of a library program, and then nothing more for, I think, more than six months now.
In a project I'm thinking of (having to do with library blogs), I'm using "updated at least once a month on average--and at least once every two months in actuality, except perhaps for summer months--and around for at least six months" as a minimum bar for a viable blog. Sound about right? Too low? Too high?
The shark metaphor works for blogs and for a number of other things (including libraries); leave it to Lawson to use such an apt metaphor so concisely.
Whenever I hear a shark
Whenever I hear a shark analogy, I always think of Annie Hall where Woody Allen says (cue whiny NY accent) "A relationship, I think, is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we've got on our hands... is a dead shark."
And Walt, I know exactly the snarky writeup you're talking about. In spite of the fact that it's completely horribly rude, it cracks me up. ;-) Yes, I'm a horrible person.
I guess the question in my mind is, is a blog a type of software or is it a specific format? When you use blog software to create a resource guide for a one-shot bibliographic instruction class or for a conference talk, is it not a blog and if not, what is it then? There are so many things that stretch the definition of blog, and I'm not sure where I would make that cutoff (or if it really matters). It's just cool to have a tool that is so flexible to offer us these options!
My answer to the first
My answer to the first question: Neither. A blog is a website (or part of a website...) the "content" portion of which follows the definition you cited in the original post (stripped of "frequently"). It's an instance, a manifestation.
Which I think answers the second question: It's a resource guide or bibliography or whatever. Not a blog.
You just prepared it using an easy content management system that's normally used to build and maintain blogs. The software isn't the manifestation, it's the tool[kit].
Some blogs don't use blogging software. Some things that aren't blogs do use blogging software.
I think it only matters to the extent that a non-blog built using blogging software may be "complete" and may be a success even though it only changes once a year--or never. A blog that hasn't changed in a year is an artifact--a former shark preserved in amber, if you will.