I'm being opinionated today

On top of offering my opinions on the information monopoly of Ovid-Lippincott, Williams, & Wilkins, and their cecession of free access to institutional print subscribers on my medical library list, I offered the following advice to a library colleague looking to set up a professional resources blog who knew I had a blog and wanted to know how I started/what software I liked. Note that my comments were made from a professional point of view...those of you LiveJournal folks out there with personal blogs are out there doing what LJ does well. I've just always found it cumbersome, and I don't like wading through happy faces and dozens of the same pictures of the same folks to get some info. I should also say that I've seen very good, professional blogs done with LiveJournal, but it seems like any service, after it becomes popular, lots of people jump on the bandwagon, often saying nothing at all. Some of the worst blogs I've seen have been LJ blogs. But hey, it's my opinion, and I'm feeling curmudgeonly today. I also developed tech snobbery back in the 80s when we were on things like BITNET and 300-baud Compuserve on an Atari and the graphical web was still science fiction. :) I'm sure flames will now commence (maybe I should dress the Rabid Librarian avatar in asbestos?)

A friend of mine was using Blogger (http://www.blogger.com) and I was intrigued, signed up, and just starting typing. I still use it, and it's the one I would recommend for any beginner, because it works well for total beginners and people who like to play with HTML, is customisable, etc. It has recently added some features, like the ability to host images and commenting, that had it lag behind Movable Type and similar software. MT is, by the way, very good for blogs you want to instantly categorise; it also works well with the Track Back system to see where you're being talked about. :) But I haven't used MT beyond a quick trial because 1) it costs money and 2) you need to be able to host PHP on a server, something I'm not sure my webspace with the phone company will do. :) There are a host of tools--most of which work with Blogger, which was one of the original blogging systems and so it's sort of like Microsoft in that everyone designed for it, things to help with blogrolls (the sidebars of links), etc. I do all those on my own, though, because...well, I'm a librarian. I like to organise things.

One of the other popular blogging sites out there is LiveJournal, but it's really better for silly people who want a bunch of 'peeps' interacting with emoticons and webcams. Okay. Sorry that was totally age-biased. Suffice to say it's not particularly user-friendly, requires that someone with a LJ send you a code (or you pay for one), and in terms of serious blogs, I give it about the same as an aol.com address for websites. I just haven't had good luck with it. Whereas I've seen some very good blogs on blog*spot (the area that Blogger provides for blogs), and of course, Blogger can be configured to publish to any other directory, say, if you have your own domain.

Also, for whatever reason, blogs (especially those at Blogger) seem to rank extraordinarily high in Google (perhaps because Google owns Blogger now--and I must say that it has really helped Blogger, as opposed to the train wreck that happened with Yahoo! gobbled up GeoCities and eGroups; that may be because the same people work at Blogger who developed it; they just get paid by Google and it's a partnership now).

Anyway, that's my 2 cents' worth.

Maybe I need food...badly?