IL04: “making the most of the blogosphere”

Steven Cohen did a great job as moderator despite having practically no voice. Stephen did have a request of the attendees to “blog the track”, i.e. get as many of the people attending the blogging sessions to blog about the presentations as they’re happening. I’ll be doing that but I can’t post (due to a lack of a free connection) live, but all this was written live, just posted later. The two presenters were Jenny Levine and Greg Schwartz.

Jenny did a quick intro to blogging, trying to make a live post. Unfortunately, her copy of Moveable Type didn’t want to post. Ah, the joys of live presentations. Jenny’s main point, libraries are done with blogging 1.0, it’s time for blogging 2.0. Her suggestions: more personalization, more linking back to library services, more blogging that involve authentication, treat local bloggers as “the press” (send them your events and press releases) and get them to link black to you, more moblogging (photo blogging), blog your statistics and projects, start a library-hosted community blog, demand of you ILS vendors RSS feeds out of the catalog, ultimately, “show the fun/human side of libraries.”

Greg bit focused more on how blogs can help the end-user through blog-related tools. First, why should librarians care about blogs? Three reasons: diversity of authors and topics, the rate of update (much faster than the traditional media,) and their increasing influence.) Tools he focused on were Feedster, Waypath, PubSub, Daypop, Popdex, Technorati, Blogsnow, Blogarama, Robin Good’s Best Blog Directory and Submission Sites, Kinja and blogrolls (lists of blogs read by a particular blogger). I also need to give Greg a special thank you for encouraging folks to go to my bookmarklets Cybertour.

And, the question was asked during the session’s Q&A: “What is RSS?” CIL04 Déjà vu…

Because of these three, I have a lot to add to my blogging & RSS book. Damn them! 😉