A post about blogging

or, more, how the mainstream media saw blogging shortly after I started blogging:

When the Mainstream Media First Met the Blog

Blogs are such an accepted form of media now that every major newspaper and most Fortune 500 companies have them. Magazine editors blog and federal department heads blog. Gwyneth Paltrow blogs and so does your mom.

But it was only a decade ago that blogs were seen as some strange beast rising out of the Internet abyss. The following press accounts recount early traditional media encounters with these reverse-chronological dragons that indicated the edge of the media map.

Thanks to PF Anderson, who tweeted the link.

Oh, this is great, must subscribe to the blog and follow her on Twitter

weird things customers say in bookshops #7

My favourite horrendous exchange is the customer who didn't want to shell out the money for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone because series always take awhile to get interesting, but then didn't understand Chamber of Secrets at all, and didn't want to go on into the series as a result.

Via Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) [as there's a quote about Coraline in there as well.

Cool site

Came across this blog today:

Morbid Anatomy: Surveying the Interstices of Art and Medicine, Death and Culture

I'm definitely subscribing to it in Google Reader.

Vanity, I suppose

but news of the going-out-of-print of The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 made me finally decide to get the book, especially as it has been discounted to $20 plus there was a coupon code which took the price down to $15. Walt Crawford is coming out with another analysis of librarian web logs soon, and so is taking the first such study off the market.

Since this blog has been around since 2001, it was included in that earlier study, including a profile and metrics. I guess I can't resist seeing something I created mentioned in print, plus I know Walt has 1) worked very hard to analyse the library blogosphere and 2) has done so during a time of personal oeconomic crisis after losing his job. I've been meaning to get the book for awhile, to get the full analysis and to help Walt out, but have put it off as a little too expensive for vanity. But $15 I can do. I hope it helps support Walt's other publishing endeavours. If you're interested in the book, follow the link at the beginning of this post. There's also But Still They Blog, which is a follow-up study published after the first. It's still in print, also at $20. PDFs for both books are only $10 each. For more information, including the coupon code that gets you 25% off your order, check out Walt's post on the subject. The coupon code is good through November 29th.

Even rabbis-to-be blog and tweet

For more on the men, look at The Road Sage website

'By traveling across America,' Levi explains, 'we have the opportunity to involve as many different types of Jews as possible to join in this cause.' 'We will be traveling in a Mitzvah mobile,' say Levi, 'a van fully-loaded with everything Jewish - books, videos, and paraphernalia; it’s like a traveling educational center.' 'Our goal is to help at least one-thousand Jewish men and women to perform a Mitzvah-a good deed by the end of our trip.'

They reached California in time for Sabbath. The trip was dedicated to the late Gabi & Rivkah Holtzberg, the Jewish couple murdered in Mumbai a few months ago (but whose son thankfully survived).

Thanks to Steven for the head's up.

An excellent Kentucky blog

Check out Unusual Kentucky, which chronicles interesting historical bits, strange symbols, odd happenings, and the like, all with regard to our Commonwealth.

Hmmm....

Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest

...95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

So I guess it's good that I never expected to get profit, book deals, or scads of followers from this blog, but simply felt like writing. Don't get me wrong, I pay attention to page views and subscribers fairly closely. I like the fact that people read this blog--but I'm not obsessed by it. I still feel like it's going strong even after nearly eight years and I guess it will so long as I feel like writing.

On the other hand, I do have an abandoned blog that I did just for a class. So I guess I've contributed to the trend as well. I'm halfway afraid to delete it, because I'd probably accidentally delete this one instead. I know, that sounds psycho, but those who know me will agree, it's something I would probably do by accident, because I'm just like that sometimes.

Okay, time to go to bed. I have eaten my second calzone ever (although shouldn't it be cal-zon-ay?) and watched an episode of Moral Orel where the Reverend said something sweet to his lesbian daughter. It wasn't that he disapproved of her dance date being a girl when she was younger--he just didn't think the girl cared enough about her. He's got more depth than I thought. I love Moral Orel. :)

I found an interesting blog

called Voyages Extraordinaires. Here is their description:

Voyages Extraordinaires is a weblog for people of intelligence and good breeding who enjoy Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romances and Retro-Futurism, Victoriana and Neo-Victorianism, Voyages Extraordinaires and Imperialist Romances, Gothic Horror, Pulp Fiction, the Golden Ages of Hollywood and of Travel, silent and early films, points suprêmes and real life adventures into places exotic and historic.

That website also led me to the Guild of Scientific Troubadours, Frankensteinia: the Frankenstein Blog, and Curious Expeditions. All piqued my interest.

I've been expanding my news reader subscriptions beyond library/tech/news to include history, primary sources in European history, and Latin language (I'm rusty in my Latin; I found a podcast series of readings of Latin lessons from a public domain book).

Anyway, that's what I've been doing for the last hour or so; checking up on my reader and finding new subscriptions. I liked the Voyages Extraordinaires blog so much I'm 'following' it through Blogger's system.

Now I'm going to go to bed. I have to get up early to work on game notes and then I'm looking at possibly a 12-hour workday, since no one was scheduled as a second person for tomorrow night and our truck was delayed to Saturday. I'm going in tomorrow at 10 am. I was supposed to leave at 6 pm, but I said I'd stay as long as I could. Depending on how I feel, that might be as late as 10 pm. Then there's grocery shopping of doom to do, followed by more work on notes. Sunday morning will come early, and then the game (yay!) I don't know if I mentioned that we started back up last weekend after a hiatus for remodelling, but we did. I really enjoyed being back together and the campaign continues. My character is badly hurt and I don't know if I'll be able to continue the adventure per se. I'm a little low on characters now. One is on maternity leave with a month-old baby, one is in the belly of Yog Sothoth (don't ask how that happened--it was sheer stupidity), one is away at training, and the rest are in a bubble reality technically not on earth, unable to leave without great danger. My last character created before the one on this mission sacrificed himself to save the world on the Antarctica campaign. Whew!

Speaking of Antarctica, did you see that an ice shelf is about to break away from Antarctica? There's a nice time-elapsed slideshow in that article.

In the slightly-Cthulhoid-or-at-least-vampiric-sci-fi/horror-medicine category, there's also something I came across in the general news, but it was also commented upon by the Guild of Scientific Troubadours. A biotech team in Canada have created a yeast-powered fuel cell that feeds on human blood. Now, the thing is, it was a story that 'broke' on April 1st, and one of the researchers is named Chin-Pang-Billy Siu, which seemed a bit improbable (no offence meant), but the story is apparently legit. This could help power implants in humans eventually.

Speaking of implants, there is also an interesting story regarding a telescopic eye implant the size of a pencil eraser that can help people with macular degeneration see. (Thanks to ScuttleMonkey on Slashdot for the link.)

Interested in librarian weblogs? Here's your book!

The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008: A Lateral Look by Walt Crawford

I've mentioned this before. It's a look at various blogs written by library people and analyses how various metrics change over time. It looks at over 600 blogs from 2007-2008 and for 143 it also includes change from 2006 on. This blog happens to be one of those. I plan on getting the book once I can. It lists for $35 but is currently on sale at Amazon.com for only $27.76 (and thus qualifying for free shipping). I hope the sale stays through to the latter part of March. Anyway, I've seen some of the author's past work and I'm interested in how this came out. If you are as well, be sure to buy the book or at least check out his blog at Walt at Random: The Library Voice of the Radical Middle.

These are fun

Michelle Kraft posted a list of blog analysis sites (not the in-depth ones like Walt Crawford's, but ones to that are computer generated). Here's how this site fared on the sites she mentioned.

Typealyzer is a site that will do a Myers-Brigg analysis on a blog. Now, I have taken Myers-Briggs tests many times, and I come out INFP--but this blog is:

ESFP - The Performers
The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

The enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.

You know, I can't really argue with that one. They say as you get older you start to get closer to the opposite quality (in my case from introvert to extrovert, intuition to sensing, feeling to thinking, perception to judgement). Looks like I may be half-way there, or at least in terms of how I write.

Then there's one that tries to recognise the gender of the author. The GenderAnalyzer says:

We think http://rabid-librarian.blogspot.com is written by a man (70%).

Okay, so they're wrong. :) I think they're still in beta testing, after all.

Finally, there's the Blog Readability Test, which shows this blog is written at:

TV Reviews

I put a few sites through it (it's not limited to blogs). What was I doing again?, the blog of a former friend who trashed me online and is very, well, pompous about her understanding and use of language came out elementary school. I admit a certain amount of glee. Granted, she could just be trying to write to a lower-reading audience. :) David Rothman, another librarian blogger I respect immensely, was at the same reading level as Michelle Kraft and I. So we're apparently writing to similar literacy levels. Then I looked at some of the news sources. Wired, despite talking a lot about technology, was on an elementary level. Slashdot, which has a lot of science news, was on the undergraduate college level, too. FoxNews, which I don't care for (being on the liberal left as I am), comes out at high school. CNN is written at a junior high school level, as it the BBC general site aimed at Americans (but the British general site is high school). The Guardian, which I visit often, is written at a high school level, too. But MSNBC, the main American news site I pay attention to? Genius! So was the BBC News website, another I read a lot, but that's not surprising, is it? I don't know if their sites in incredibly complex by the terms of the algorithm or what. I don't have any trouble navigating them.

I know they say things written for a general audience should be written for fifth or sixth grade, but I just don't believe in dumbing down my personal writing (although, yes, if I were making a brochure, I would try to make it understandable to those with lower literacy). But I'm happy with where mine falls. I wouldn't want it to be so fraught with complexity that you'd have to be a genius to read my blog, but some basic college education and understanding of big words is nice. Or does that make me an elitist?

Anyway, go have fun with these. Thanks to the Krafty Librarian for the links!

It's out!

Walt Crawford's book The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008: A Lateral Look has been published and is available for purchase. The book looks at 607 liblogs, as Crawford calls them--blogs posted by 'library people' rather than by libraries--and compares various statistics from 2007 to 2008. And you know what? This blog is one of them! The book grows out of Crawford's work with his Cites & Insights online magazine.

Find out whether your blog is included in an online listing.

For more about the book, check out his entry on LISNews. From now through January 15, 2009 is available for $22.50 plus shipping. After that, it'll be $35.00. I'll definitely have to order the book as soon as I can.

Yay! I finished my class!

On the mashup section I came across a nifty site called Weather Bonk. It overlays Google Maps with weather information, gives you access to webcams, and displays forecasts. Try it out.

Also, I found a wonderful etiquette blog whilst searching about the white shoe rule the other day. It's Etiquette, Charm, and Beauty for the Woman of Today by Hildegarde Fillmore.

Also, if you haven't tried iGoogle, you should. It's a personalised web page that can be set as the home page that allows you to bring a variety of modules into play, such as Gmail or Google Docs. I have a nifty theme on mine that changes as the sun rises and sets and the moon changes phases. You do have to sign up, but it's free, and if you already have an account for other similar projects then you should be okay. In addition to my documents and mail, I also have a virtual fish tank and National Geographic pictures.

Okay, definitely time to go to bed.

The rough seas of the blogosphere

Corporate employee blogs: Lawsuits waiting to happen?

I've had my own run ins because of this blog. It seems everyone wants to control your opinion these days. This article focusses on employees and policies regarding identifying their connexion to various industries or companies when discussing issues related to their field.

As an example, a quote:

If someone is a fisherman and they want to talk about fly fishing outside of work, then that's not our business, it's personal. But if someone is going to talk about notebooks...they have to say they're from Dell.
--Bob Pearson, Dell vice president

As part of this whole Library 2.0 thing

with the webcast and the class, I finally got around to using Google Reader as an RSS aggregator to subscribe to different blogs without having to go to each and every one. Google Reader allows you to 'share' particularly interesting posts with others, and then list some of them on your blog, which I have done up above. So, if you're wondering what I'm reading, that's a snippet. Click on 'read more' in the widget to get more posts. Most of what I'm reading through the aggregator is library-related. So if you'd like to get a snippet of library literature and I haven't posted about a story here, you may want to try that.

I'd like to blog more tonight, because I have several things to blog about, but I'm tired and should probably head on to bed. Perhaps tomorrow....

The president of MLA blogs

about hospital IT departments and their tendency to block useful social networking sites (like Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube).

It includes a chart from a survey listing what percentage of MLA members' institutions block each site. It doesn't break it down between hospitals, academic medical centres, etc., yet. Heartening is that 66% of reporting members said their institution did not block any site. But it's frustring for the rest of us.

I'm not sure what ours blocks. I think the only one I've come across is YouTube, when I was looking for a presentation video I'd seen at a conference that I wanted to view again. We at least have the option of appealing if we have a legitimate reason for accessing the site, though, and that's great.