Thoughts from this week

Wow! I've been trying to digest all this new information this week. One of my proudest accomplishments was figuring out how to use bloglines. I signed up for feeds from 10 blogs. Some of them I searched out using Google's blogsearch. I also put the notifier on my desktop, so I have a feeling I will now become a blog addict. (I really hadn't been reading any before.)

As far as what makes a blog successful, my ideas are probably pretty obvious. Most of us probably start blogs because of our needs (to market out product, to express ourselves, etc.) But for people to follow your blog, you have to give them something they need or want. Helpful advice, or entertainment, whatever.

Blogs that have a lot of comments at least SEEM more successful to me. Seems that the audience is more engaged. I noticed that a lot of the library blogs I looked at consistently have no comments. I'm trying to think of ways to intrigue our audience. I may have picked this idea up from someone this week, but I'm thinking of a "mystery photo of the week" from our Archives (we have tons of unidentified photos) to ask people to identify. My boss is also thinking of running a "caught in the library" photo each week of a student, uh...caught in the library.

As for the blogging tools, at the moment, our college has one particular blogging program that goes with our website. But I'm thinking of starting an internal blog for our library staff and hope I can get around that, since it won't be on our website. I would like to try either Blogger or Word Press for us. We need something easy that we can all figure out pretty quickly, and Nanette mentioned these in the webcast yesterday as being more intuitive to use. I also wanted to make sure we have a program that can sort our entries by categories or labels, so we can find old posts more easily--History Resources or printing tips or whatever.

 Robin