Wouldn’t you like to be a blogger, too?

1. Wouldn’t you like to be a blogger, too? Jonathan H. Harwell Reference Librarian for Education University of Alabama at Birmingham http://www.bloglines.com/blog/mesoj jharwell@uab.edu

2. What is a blog (or weblog)? • That depends upon whom you ask. • Broadly defined, an oft-updated web resource • Usually a personal journal with dated entries and RSS (really simple syndication; allows readers to subscribe via an aggregator, or blog reader) • Examples • This Modern World: www.thismodernworld.com • Baghdad Burning: riverbendblog.blogspot.com • librarian.net: www.librarian.net • The Blog of Henry David Thoreau: blogthoreau.blogspot.com • Mesoj: www.bloglines.com/blog/mesoj

3. Why be a blogger? • Communicate with your patrons or colleagues about library services, database changes, subject-area news & research, etc. • Find your niche. You might blog about academic librarianship or another special area of knowledge (maybe evaluating a trial to a product), or help your patrons set up a group blog about books they love or a book club. • Ranganathan’s laws apply across formats. See more at the bottom of http://www.db.dk/lb/phd/.

4. How can I create a blog? • An excellent Bloglines tutorial is at http://tinyurl.com/ap42n. • A comparison of some blog services is at http://www.tcs.org/ioport/may05/blog.htm • Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to know HTML to be a blogger. One of the advantages of blogging is pure simplicity. It’s quick & easy to create, and to update.

5. How can I create a blog? (cont.) • Most blog services are free. • Once you’ve chosen a service (remember that some allow reader comments, which can be a good or bad idea), go ahead & register, to see how easy it is to keep up with blogs as a reader. By then, you’ve already nearly become a blogger.

6. Building your blogroll • Use your blog service to find feeds of other blogs which interest you. Be sure to check all of your favorite bookmarked websites to see whether they have feeds. • Some blog services allow you to also add Yahoo Groups, e-mail discussion lists, etc., to your reader interface. You can get rid of much of your e-mail traffic this way. • Your blogroll is a list of the feeds you subscribe to. You can make each subscription private or public.

7. Building your blog • Choose a catchy title. Add an intriguing description of yourself and the purpose of the blog. (You can be anonymous or pseudonymous if you like!) • Plant the seeds before you decorate the garden. Some blog services have lots o’ customization features, but most of these don’t even appear in a blog reader interface.

8. Helpful Hint # 1 • Once you publish a new post on your blog, it can be captured in Google caches, every one of your subscribers sees it, and you can’t take it back. Even if you edit, update, or delete a post from the blog, the “first edition” of that post will still appear in everyone’s blog readers, along with any new edition.

9. Helpful Hint # 2 • Give credit where it’s due. Link to outside sources instead of copying them. Mark all quotes with quotation marks. Thank a person for writing it, or for letting you know about it. (Thanks, Self!)

10. How can I get folks to read it? • Submit the URL to Google, Yahoo, & other search engines as well as blog directories (see http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55). • Catalog it! See: Moeller, Paul, & Nathan Rupp. “TalkLeft, Boing Boing, and Scrappleface: the phenomenon of weblogs and their impact on library technical services.” Library Resources & Technical Services; Jan. 2005, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 7+. • Make it interesting, and update it often.