Exercise 2

I admit that I started off this exercise with a great degree of skepticism. I know that there is value to the idea of blogging as a way of interconnecting both people and ideas. And that building bridges so that these ideas can be spread among different communities is of great importance. All of this made a great deal of sense from a theoretical perspective. I was interested in blogging and what made it such a fascinating medium. In fact, I suppose as I do find certain authors interesting in syndication, it is a form of blog that I appreciate. But trying to author my own blog and then to try to find what was useful about other librarians blogging was much something I questioned a great deal. What makes a good blog? Furthermore, what do I think makes a good blog? It is the architecture of the successful blog that I am interested in.

My research began with the addition of the five blogs that we were required to add for the assignment as well as the reading of the material in the book on blogging. It was certainly interesting to find that there were several different types of blogs. David Lee King could be placed as either a short article blogger or as a series blogger. Occasionally he would take the time to write a series of blogs on what he found important at that moment. Currently he was interested in getting his fellow librarians to see the desirability of maintaining a regular blog. He did report on other library topics as well.

In the Library with the Lead pipe was of great interest as it was a series of essays. Aside from the amusing obvious "Clue" reference, the person was interested in getting a whole lot of guest authors to discuss in long essays subjects of interest to them. There was no particular one theme, but I found all of the Long Article forms fascinating. I think it went well with my desire to read some long essays by some of my favorite syndicated columnists.

Librarian By Day was more interested in presenting links with small blurbs to be able to discuss areas of interest on particular topics in the library. They were not interested in writing much in the way of essays on anything. But rather, they were more interested in presenting articles that could be linked to and looked up on any various topics. Also the site occasionally posted lists of interesting places without actually linking the places up for the people reading their blog.

The Distant Librarian was either link blurb or link only. They presented links with a bare minimum of discussion about those links. From an aesthetic viewpoint it was not a very appealing place to visit. However, it may be something that I would want to skim through every now and then trying to pick up some tidbit of information through the links they posted on the topic that was being discussed in the blog.

The Librarians commute was a series of short article blogs about an academic library and what is going on in their area. I found these short articles interesting, although maybe not as interesting as the long article format from a person preference. However there were some areas of interest that I found in some of the articles from time to time. You might consider it a series blog as the sole goal is to discuss academic libraries, but I wouldn't call it that as its efforts in discussing the libraries seem broad and its application far exceeds that of merely an academic library.

Finally I went to view three other blogs that I subscribed to from the list of blogs that there were given. I chose primarily from the public library forum as I am currently working in a public library and wanted to see what they did with their blogs. As a result I chose the Brooklyn Book Talk blog and the Dover Public Library Blog. The first blog, as its title suggests is about books. I would imagine that this would be a very useful blog for setting up a book chat with people from the library. One could use this blog as a starting off point, to get ideas for discussion about the coming book that that is going to be had, or it could be used to carry on the discussion after the book chat on any particular area of interest. I believe if marketed properly, it would be a very useful tool for enhancing the program of the book chat at the library.

The Dover Public Library was a much more broad blogging tool. It was used to discuss all about the goings on in the community of Dover. It listed things from events that were going on at the library to different events in the community. Furthermore it did a good job of trying to tie back any personal reflections that were placed in the blog to items at the library. One such blog discussed the belief that the community was going through a very "twilight zone" moment, relating what was going on in the community to a particularly twilight episode. They then listed where the library held the episode so that people could do further research on the topic discussed.

Finally I went to one of the "successful" blogs to get an idea of what went into what was considered a successful blog. For this one I chose Librarian in Black. I must admit that a large fascination with literature and the fact that Librarian in Black could have multiple allusions. Either one could go with Men in Black the movie, or one could go with the Man in Black as a reference to Johnny Cash. There might be even further allusions in this one brief title, but it certainly was an auspicious beginning for an interesting blog. When I got there I was a bit surprised on what I found. While there were a very few long essays that covered interesting topics such as libraries and dealing with music and digital rights management issues, the vast majority of the blog is library recommends. And while they certainly had a large amount of links to peruse at my own time, the links did not seem to have any particular order or theme. So it wasn't like I could go and find a list with several links on a topic that I was interested in. I had to go through each reading and see if there was anything of interest to me today. I admit that I was a little disappointed.

I think the one thing that my blog searching has taught me through all of this is that when I begin my own blog, there should be an audience that I am seeking to present my items to, and I should have a consistent and ordered way of presenting my information such that someone who is interested in my blog may easily find the information that I would be presenting them. I also learned that there are multiple ways of blogging in a public library that would be useful to the library and the marketing of the things that the library does.