explodedlibrary.info

disputing the librarian shortage

[27/6/05 update: This post has been followed up here]

Wouldn’t be nice if every time a library school or the ALA or anybody else dares to mention the supposed librarian shortage, that dozens of librarian bloggers will raise their voices and refute this myth. I would like to hope that that those who benefit from the over-supply of entry level librarians will learn that they can’t get away with this anymore. Thanks to blogs, librarians with current or recent experience of what the job market is really like will notice this misinformation. We now have the capacity and willingness to contradict it, until we force the library powers that be into a dialogue about this. I am a reasonable person and I am very interested to hear an explanation of how there can be a librarian shortage when there are so many unemployed and underemployed librarians.

ambiguity is important

I’ve just been through some soul-searching about how blogging fits into my wider aspirations of creative writing. I had been concerned that all the time and energy that I had for writing had been going onto this non-fiction exploded library blog, making it difficult for me to do more creative writing. One reason for this is that I have been unsure how to do creative writing in the blog medium. Yes, there are fictional blogs and hypertext stories, but I wonder whether these too are just awkward adaptations of print forms into the hypertext/blog medium. What I want is to do something totally different that’s native to blogs, so that the form complements the substance. I don’t want to just adapt poems or stories into a different medium.

This is what I’m going to do with ambivalenz. I don’t yet have a name for what I’m going to try, but from now on, it may or may not be fiction. The ambiguity is important. This blog, on the other hand, will remain unchanged.

counter-point on networking

In my last post about job-seeking methods, I wrote that is possible to conduct a successful job search without relying on networking. I want to make it clear that  although I've really had much luck with networking myself, that doesn't mean that it doesn't work. As a counter-point, I'm posting this example of how networking can work. I like it because the example is low-key and realistic, but still successful. [thanks to Fran M for posting this on the aliaNEWGRAD list]

the fiendish secrets of comment spammers

This blog hasn't been spammed in a little while, but this morning I got two very noxious examples. I jumped right on it, banning the IP address, deleting the comments and freezing the post. This particular aspect of blog maintenance is kind of like weeding a garden, tiresome but necessary. Of course, it gets much much worse if the weeds (comment  spam) get a foothold in the blog.

The really interesting thing is that I found this link in my referrer log. This was where the spammer must have found the post which he later spammed. This site is fascinating in a twisted and amoral type of way.

So I've learned a new acronym, SEO for Search Engine Optimization, and have had a glimpse into a pretty sordid subculture on the web. If they're going to feed off amateur bloggers, the least we can do is expose their methods and hangouts.

ambivalenz re online dating

My other blog, ambivalenz, has been struggling since I moved to Sydney. I'm hoping that this post on online dating will breathe some life into it and establish a new, less Tasmania-focused direction for it.

Six Apart and LiveJournal

Six Apart’s acquisition of LiveJournal (see Six Apart’s announcement and LiveJournal’s announcement) is very interesting news for me because I’m a satisfied user of both LiveJournal and TypePad.

I know that the reputation of Six Apart was thoroughly trashed in the blogosphere after they announced their new licensing scheme for MovableType, but I think that a lot of that criticism was unwarranted.

I would love it if further down the track, they could incorporate some LJ-like features into TypePad, such as being able to set up communities and specify granulated viewing permissions for particular posts.

I’m more concerned about how this may affect LiveJournal. If this acquisition means that LJ will still be doing its own thing a few years from now, whereas otherwise this may have been in doubt, this acquisition is a good thing. It’s not as if this is like the sad day when Microsoft bought Hotmail.

now that I have your attention for maybe 90 seconds

Here's a very interesting post in How to Save the World about the growth in blog creation and the even larger growth in blog readership. I'm pasting the most interesting snippets, but encourage people to read the whole thing.

These surveys also indicate that the average blog reader stays only 90 seconds per page, and only 40 seconds per page on 'A-list' blogs.
...
What this means is that if blog readership continues to soar (doubling every 18 months) and newspaper readership continues to stagnate, in three years the average B-list blogger will be getting significantly more reader attention than the average unsyndicated US newspaper article or column, and the average A-list blogger will be getting almost as much reader attention as the average US daily paper.

According to the definitions on this post, I'm a happy C-List blogger so things won't be quite so exciting for me. For me, it's just about doing my own thing, and if other people get something out of it, great, and if not, well it doesn't matter. It's fine for me to think this now, but would things change if I were getting a hundred thousand hits a day? Would I feel any additional sense of responsibility if I were in this position, and would that take the fun out of it? Would the blog totally consume my real life? Of course, I don't need to worry about these things happening to me, but if there's any truth to this post, this sort of thing will happen to others.

very impressed with Firefox for Mac

I've been using Firefox on my Windows machine at work for the last month. I'm not surprised that it runs circles around that pathetic excuse for a browser that's loaded with Windows XP. If you're a Windows user, there is absolutely no excuse not to try Firefox - unless you're not allowed to. You will be kicking yourself for every day that you put it off.

What does surprise me is how well Firefox compares with the other Mac browsers. Yesterday I downloaded it for my iBook and I can say that the Mac version doesn't disappoint. It's very fast, both to load and to use, it has tabs (of course) and most helpfully for me, supports rich text editing which allows me to do WYSIWYG updating of this blog in TypePad (neither Opera nor Safari offer this feature).

I've pretty much decided that I'll be using Firefox on my Mac most of the time. The other two browsers aren't bad. Safari is also very quick but I still don't like its brushed metal interface and don't use many of its unique .Mac related features. Opera 7.5 takes longer to load than both Safari and Firefox, but because I have it, I'll still use Opera when I'm about to start a heavy-duty web searching session. Its keyboard shortcuts are marginally better than Firefox's and allow for faster searching, and it's nice to be able to take those snapshots of browsing sessions and be able to retrieve them at a later time. But for casual browsing, Firefox is more than enough.

The table below compares the main three Mac browsers as I see them. I'm not including Internet Explorer 5.2 (a browser without tabs or pop-up blocking and hasn't received a major update in over 4 years is a waste of my time), Netscape 7.1 (better than IE, but bloatware when compared with its cousin Firefox) or OmniWeb 5 (sorry).

	Firefox	Opera	Safari
Gmail support
Load speed	close 2nd	distant 3rd	1st
.Mac support built-in
Power-search features	close 2nd	1st	3rd
Price	Free	Ad-supported / $US 39	Free
Rich text editing
Tabbed Browsing

post-publication editing

This is something that most bloggers need to find their own answer to at some point. Editing entries after they’ve been posted.

Some people take the view that each blog post is a working and living document, to be edited however and whenever the author sees fit. I can understand the appeal of this approach, but as a librarian blogger, I can’t bring myself to do this. I would feel as if I were contributing to the difficulties of finding information on the internet. There are enough broken links and disappearing documents already without me adding a few more.

This will be my approach. I offer this more to clarify my thoughts and actions than as a prescription for others to follow.

Phase 1. For the first 12 hours, any change is fair game. This could include any edits, as well as completely deleting the post. This is my version of “sleeping on it”.
Phase 2. Between 12-72 hours after the initial posting, I will make changes to correct spelling and grammar. I may also improve the writing style, in minor ways that don't alter the substance of the post. Sometimes I drop words, a problem that’s difficult for me to notice until some time has passed. If I ever drop a “not”, this can be a huge problem because it means that the words are saying the opposite to my intention. But other than that, I won’t make any substantive changes to that document. For example, I won’t add another paragraph or even sentence, nor will I remove any. And I won’t delete the post, even if I wish that I’d never written it.
Phase 3. After 72 hours have passed, I won’t even correct the non-substantive spelling or grammatical mistakes which make me look stupid. The post is inviolate, except for the exceptions...

Exceptions
Of course a person's views can change and evolve and why shouldn’t I allow the flexibility of blogging tools to reflect this? Well I can, but in new posts. I can write a follow up post and insert a link to that in the original post. I could even write a totally new version of a post, but again this will be a new post. The original post will stand unchanged, except for a notice that this post has been superseded, and a link to the new version. As I mentioned before, I won’t ever a delete a post that’s older than 12 hours, but if I’m ever in the unenviable situation where I really want to, I can disavow or repudiate it. Again, the original will remain in existence, but I will include a note that the post has been disavowed, with a link to the reasons why, if I chose to write any. Finally, I will make any deletions or edits if that seems like an appropriate response to any legal action – which will hopefully never happen.

The worst thing a blogger can do, in my view, is to be sneaky about post-publication edits and deletions. Anybody who makes a habit of this will eventually be caught and will probably be very embarrassed.