Rebecca Blood’s first article on Weblogs promotes blogging as a way to gain awareness of your own likes and dislikes. Well, that is a nice idea but check out the comment thread on Gonzo Librarian’s blog (Kelly), begun by Shauna-Lee (Menno Girl), about filtering your thoughts on blogs in order to not lose out on future job offers. I suppose this is the problem with all forms of publication, but it seems that it is harder to hide behind an alias on the web than in traditional printing methods. Enough on that, if you’d like to contribute to the discussion, join us in commenting on Gonzo Librarian!
So there, I’ve done my duty as called for in Rebecca Blood’s second article Hammer, Nail: How Blogging Software Reshaped the Online Community, I have linked to other weblogs to amplify my classmates’ voices (also mentioned under the heading Blog Popularity in the Wikipedia article). But I couldn’t figure out how to ‘permalink’ Kelly’s posting or our comments, can anyone help?
While I’m not sure about Blood’s idea of growing more in touch with yourself by writing a blog – as opposed to other forms of writing (personal diary, anyone?) or even meditation, I do agree with Meg Hourihan’s What we are doing when we blog’s statement of difference between other written publications and the blog: “The weblog’s post unit liberates the writer from word count.” My post this week could be two words! But I doubt I would earn much credit for that. Amanda?
In the Wikipedia article I was delighted to learn there is a term for a blog written by a mobile device – a moblog. That’s a great name, but why does it need it’s own term? I feel like it is simply there to clutter my brain (I will never be on jeopardy). But thanks to a link from this article I finally used Technorati, rather than just checking out the site as I have done previously, and I tested it with a search for library blogs. I really like how easy they have made it to refined your search as you go – no special advanced search page necessary, you can just click on the dropdown menus at the top of your results page. Great!
Finally, a special thanks to Anatomy of a Blog for inspiring me to think of another title for my blog. Not sure if it will change yet, but I am inspired nonetheless. And I promise to look into adding the time to my entries.
I discussed this idea of “growing more in touch with yourself” in my own response to this weeks readings. If we accept that blogging borders on the spiritual, I wonder what sort of self will we discover using these forms of expression. Will we be encouraging our library users to blog their way to Nirvana?!?
“My post this week could be two words! But I doubt I would earn much credit for that.”
- I’d have to say that would really depend on the words!
“But I couldn’t figure out how to ‘permalink’ Kelly’s posting or our comments”
- one of the most liberating AND frustrating things about blogs is the ability to customize the interface, which results in really obvious permalinks on some blogs, and well hidden permalinks in others! (Often not the blogger’s fault, but the fault of the template). On Kelly’s blog, the permalinks are embedded in the time-stamp at the end of the post (again, probably not Kelly’s choice, just a design feature of her template). And, unfortunately, Blogger does not provide permalinks to comments like wordpress.com does.