explodedlibrary.info

two posts that weren't here

It's been a busy night of blogging for me - at Libraries Interact and in the bunker.

post 3

Tonight's blogging is over at Libraries Interact.

15 comments (and 5 posts) in 15 days

I had a little epiphany last week when writing up a post for Libraries Interact about day 9 of the 30 posts in 30 days event. The result is that I’ve decided to set myself a modified challenge that’s more realistic for me. Starting today, 15 comments (and 5 posts) in 15 days.

Anyone else is more than welcome to try this, but for me, it’s just a personal goal. The posts, which will average at about one every three days (a massive increase for me, considering my recent activity), will probably be here, but they could possibly be in the exploded library bunker or Libraries Interact or LiveJournal or Vox or that which must not be named.

But the main part of the challenge is the commenting. Although one comment a day is not at all onerous, it will make me focus on reading other blogs more actively than I have been in the recent past. This can only be a good thing. I still feel as if I am settling into my new life in Canberra, and I hope that this goal will instill good habits to improve my blogging and involvement in the blogging community.

The numbers of comments and posts and days are just minimums.

the halcyon days of blogging are over

Almost ten years ago I read librarian.net and the Shifted Librarian on the web. I had no idea there was such a word as "blog", I had no clue about RSS readers.

Three years after that, I could no longer ignore the word "blog", I decided to learn about it and discovered the amazing thing about it - that they weren’t very difficult to make.

Despite the title of this post, I have little use for nostalgia. I don't wish to relive those early years of blogging, but I would like to understand and communicate how it felt back then.

It was extremely liberating. Some of that was the technology, the blogging software combined with the rise of Google. For the first time, self-publishing was inexpensive, easy and viable as a way of reaching an audience. But it wasn't just the technology, there was the notion that the blog was your own platform, use it to express yourself and say whatever the hell you want to say. After all, most people didn’t even know about blogs.

Gradually things changed, more people started blogging and more people started paying attention to bloggers, and things got more serious. But those changes were flowing on from the growth of blogging and were to be expected.

What I’m more interested in is the disruptive change, the changes which I wouldn’t have imagined in 2002.

MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and similar services. Although I have described blogging as "not difficult", publishing via these new services is extremely easy. Although blogging has become fairly mainstream now, the ease of use factor of Twitter particularly has helped it become way more mainstream.

The difference between an old fashioned blog and somebody's Twitter or Facebook or MySpace page is that a blog is published for the whole world to see, whereas it’s possible to control who can access the newer services. This may sound fairly obvious, but I think it's caused a difference in how people use these newer self-publication services.

The really interesting thing is that most of the time, a blog is external to its author. Even the most personal blog is still a creation of its author, and not an extension of the author - like someone’s Facebook page. There are exceptions, such as the fake Stephen Conroy on Twitter. My own twitter handle is explodedlibrary, which may have been a mistake because my tweets are often quite different from my blog postings, which is one reason why I keep them protected.

I wonder, if more and more people can express themselves via Twitter or Facebook, does that mean that over time less people will be interested in starting or continuing blogging?

Guessing the future is always hazardous, because the things which cause the biggest change can never be predicted.

But even if blogging does go into a gradual decline, in terms of its popularity or influence (it's possible that if the mainstream news media continues in its downward spiral, blog posts may gain even more influence), I'm not worried that all of a sudden blogging will become meaningless.

still here

I'm writing this with Typepad's iPhone blogging app. It seems to work well enough but it has a number of short comings which means it would only be useful under very limited circumstances.

The most obvious difficulty is with writing anything substantial on the iPhone's keyboard. Just getting a sentence right on the touch keyboard is a challenge. Writing paragraphs does not seem practical at all. The writing ends up lagging too far behind the thought process. The keyboard is workable for short things but definitely not for anything lengthy.

Shorter blog posts tend to be link blogging, but it's not possible make links on the iPhone. There's no option in the Typepad blogging app, probably because the iPhone doesn't allow copying & pasting.

So I can see iPhone being useful for photo blogging, for those people who are brave enough to rely on the iPhone's rather limited camera. It would also be useful for writing short posts which don't need links. But those sort of posts seem more appropriate for micro-blogging applications like Twitter.

I haven't forgotten about the rest of ALLA conference. I was hoping to get most of that finished last weekend, but unfortunately I've caught a nasty cold which I'm still dealing with. There is something wrong about going through all this when it's not winter.

tonight's blogging ...

can be found in my post on Libraries Interact.

different blogs, different masks

Sometimes I think that if I were starting blogging today, I would choose to write under a pseudonym. I think that I may have wanted that initially, but the blogging software I was using at the time - Radio userland - had a default of displaying the blogger's name. Before I learned how to turn that off, my name was already out there in links from other bloggers. It's interesting how little seemingly random accidents can have a lasting impact.

But I wasn't too worried that my name was out there. At first it seemed that my blogging life would always be quarantined from the rest of my life. It seemed like a long long time before I met any other bloggers face to face or anyone who had read my blog.

Of course everything's different now. I am aware that every word I write is potentially viewable by my past, present and future employers and co-workers, prospective girlfriends, exes, friends and enemies, all sorts of family members, including my mother. When I get an idea for a post, at some point I need to decide whether this is the sort of post I want to have on my blog, given all of this.

If I blogged under a pseudonym, I wouldn't have to worry about this. I could be more controversial and not worry about alienating the prejudiced and easily offended. There would be other things to worry about - namely protecting my secret identity. When writing about specific work or personal things, I couldn't be too detailed, or I would need to fictionalize some of the details (although that can be fun). I would need to keep other bloggers at arm's length, and would be reluctant to attend blogging meetups or be involved in a group like lint.

I do think that there are advantages and disadvantages to both kinds of authorship.

I don't buy into the "named bloggers are inherently more ethical and accurate" argument either. For me, the potential readership of this blog does make me feel personally accountable for my blogging - to play nice with others and not be sloppy in my research or writing. But just because it's like this for me, I can't assume that it's like this for everyone or that the converse is true - that anonymous/pseudonymous bloggers don't care about playing nice or checking their facts. Recently at MPOW I was put in a very unusual situation - of needing to find a shortlist of blogs in a subject I didn't know a lot about, project management. Although I feel very reticent about rating blogs, I devised a quick & dirty way that I could live with. Whether the blog was written under a pseudonym or by a named author was irrelevant. It's possible that under my criteria, a named blog by somebody who really has made a name for themselves may receive bonus points, but that's as far as it would go. If a blog - be it named or pseudonymous - contained mean-spirited ad hominem attacks, I'd probably rate it low for "quality" and give it negative bonus points.

Before I finish, I should probably mention that this post is my indirect response to the Annoyed Librarian's post on this. I have a lot of time for the Annoyed Librarian. We have a couple of things in common: we are both skeptics about the librarian shortage and we have both made fun of 2.0 stuff. I still think that the Library 2.0 label has done more harm than good. I care deeply about the components, which existed quite happily before anyone made up the lame Library 2.0 term. It still annoys me that these pre-existing technologies and ideas have been co-opted by Library 2.0, when I think they would have been better off left on their own. Mark my words, it won't be long before Library 2.0 sounds as cringe worthy as that mid-1990s gem "information superhighway." Where I differ from the Annoyed Librarian is that I do care about advancing much of what has been labelled Library 2.0. Because of this, I have been willing to jump on the Library 2.0 bandwagon when it's helped me communicate and work with colleagues, and then I jump off again and it's been ok.

See also

the power and/or vulnerability of named and anonymous bloggers (July 2005)

why I choose blogging

This post is the somewhat delayed sequel to my writing games post, but it's also about five years of blogging.

Before in my writing games post, I stated that different forms of writing - blogging, journalism, academic writing - each have their place in the world, serving different functions and attracting different types of people. Now I want to say why for me, I choose blogging.

When I write, I want my words to be findable. Not just for me, not just for my professional peers, but for anyone who for whatever random or serendipitous reason might be interested.

There was a very interesting exchange the other week between Lorcan Dempsey and Walt Crawford over Walt's description of blogs as "grey literature" in Cites & Insights 7:9. I don't want to misquote Walt, while he also described blogs as grey literature, he also said that grey literature represented the most compelling and worthwhile literature in the library field today. For the person who doesn't have the information retrieval resources or skills of a librarian, it is the professional library literature which is closer to what is usually known as grey literature - that which is difficult to impossible to find in full-text, and when it is available, prohibitively expensive.

It is a valid point that because blogs are not indexed and systematically archived, they may be very difficult to find in the future, even more difficult to find than a peer reviewed article published in an obscure library journal. I think it's likely that as the blog medium develops and matures, more blogs will be indexed and archived in some form, if only on a selective basis (thus requiring the involvement of some sort of gatekeeper). This has already happened with projects like the Internet Archive and projects like PANDORA in Australia. My other response to this, is to trust that if a blog post had any impact, it may have been noticed by someone else - and that even if the blog disappears, some of the traces which the blog left on the blogosphere during its time may remain. That answer might not be be satisfying to a researcher, but as a writer, it suffices for me. It's not quite the same as producing a physical item, such as a book or a printed journal article, and knowing that the physical item will be around long after I'm gone. But there's more to posterity than physical objects - what is the point of being published if it means that you are less likely to be read in the present and short-term future than if your words were available online right now? Which reminds me that I don't care much for posterity - I care more about what I'm writing now than what has happened to what I wrote five years ago.

I'd rather my words be scattered in the gigantic haystack where most people are playing than held in a closed stack where only the elite are allowed in.

There are other reasons why I choose blogging - I'm not going into them all here, but the medium of academic writing increasingly seems broken in the twenty-first century. Rising serial costs are making these sources even more inaccessible and obscure. There's also the problem of the unacceptable delays between submission and publication (even up to five years!). It's a game which has zero appeal to me, which is ok, because I probably wouldn't play it very well anyway. And so I finish where I began, each to her or his own.

see also:
Stephanie Willen Brown, Blog- or Print Publishing?, CogSci Librarian
Mark Lindner, Keeping up, why is it always forward-thinking?, Off the Mark
Dani Rodrik, Why publish in a journal if you can disseminate online?, Dani Rodrik's weblog

Currently playing in iTunes: We're Good People But Why Don't We Show It? by Holly Throsby

the writing games

This may have happened when I was in my high school’s badminton team. We were a bunch of friends playing together and badminton was a good excuse to hang out, but we weren’t exactly a great team. I think the only times we ever received any points was when the other side forfeited. One day we booked the gym for some badly needed practice. We showed up and found that there'd been a mixup with the booking and our court had been double-booked with the volleyball team. My badminton team wasn’t exactly super-dedicated, we may have walked away if it wasn’t for the volleyball team’s superior attitude, just assuming we’d defer to them. We ended up both stubbornly playing in the space. The two games shared a similar net and similar sized court - the different sets of lines were already drawn into floor. Having two different games being played on the same court was not an ideal situation. One of my friends had a volleyball pelted into his shoulder. But I guess that it's not nice to be hit on the face with a badminton shuttle or hit on the elbow with a badminton racquet. The joint practice was not a success. After that the two teams generally loathed each other.

This is not a real allegory where every little detail has meaning. The chaotic image of two different games happening in the same space recently came to mind when I was thinking about the relationship between blogging and other writing forms – particularly academic writing and journalism.

No analogy is ideal. This writing as a game analogy may suggest that writing is a trivial activity, that it's just a game. But I think games are important microcosms of reality. Each game has its own distinct ways of winning and losing and participation. The different games require different skills and attract different sorts of players. Some people play to win, others do it for the money, some just like to show off their skills. Some people play simply to have fun or because the game is a group activity and they like the camaraderie with the other players.

Each game regards itself as more important and interesting than the other games. Often the players of one game may have a negative view of the other games. For example, a blogger may view academic writing as anachronistic and elitist. An academic writer may view blogging as a meaningless low-brow game or a hideously bastardized version of their own game.

One way of looking at these different forms of writing is to be relativistic – each of these games serves different functions and attracts different sorts of people. Actually I’d better stop right now. In the next part of this post ["why I choose blogging", written on 15 August 2007], I’ll explore the non-relativistic path.

dealing with clutter in the blog reader

I used to stress out about information overload - it was one of the early themes of this blog in 2002 and 2003. Even when I stopped writing about it, it would still bother me when after a break from blog reading, I'd see over 1000 unread blog posts in my reader. I would struggle to read/skim through that huge pile and afterwards would feel totally drained.

I'm sure somebody would tell me that I'm subscribing to too many blogs. That if I removed some of this clutter, this problem wouldn't be so bad. I've tried that and it didn't solve all of my problems. I found it even more draining to go through all the blogs I've subscribed to with a critical eye, evaluating whether this blog was worthy to be on my radar at all. The more I thought about each blog, the more complicated the decision would become. I would end up reducing the number of blogs I subscribed to, but I wonder whether it was worth all of the effort that it took. And then after I did that, of course the number would only increase again as I discovered more interesting blogs and added them to my reader. Some people deal with that problem by setting a number which will be the definite number of blogs they subscribe to - so that if you add a new blog, you have to remove another. That didn't work for me either - it just made me not want to add any new blogs because it was such a hassle to get rid of one, and so my reading list atrophied for a while until I just gave up and started adding without removing. The other problem with that is that not all blogs publish with the same frequency, so that number of blogs subscribed to is not going to determine how many blog posts you'll be reading.

I've found that over the past few months, I've developed a different way of dealing with clutter in the blog reader. It's messy but it works for me. I'm offering this not as a prescription which everyone should follow, but just as an alternative.

Here's the key thing. The number of blogs you subscribe to does not equal the number of blogs that you pay close attention to. There needn't be this dichotomy between subscribe and dump. That dichotomy is an anachronism from print. There can be all sorts of degrees to which you pay attention to a blog. There are some blogs which I read every day, more than every day if they update more frequently. Other ones, every few days, or every week or so, or every month - basically whenever I'm in the mood.

This leads onto another important point. It's not important to know everything that's happening as soon as it happens. That's why it's ok for a blog in your reader to languish unread for a month. It's not as if we're journalists working for rival newspapers who all want the big scoop and that being first to press is so important. I think there's value in unearthing the recent and not so recent past. It's probably true that most blog posts get buried without making much of an impact. This could be for all sorts of reasons - maybe it wasn't a good post or maybe it was a good post, but it was published on a big news day when everybody else was distracted by something else.

Deal with the volume not by unsubscribing, but by promoting and demoting. If I find that a blog has been posting too much, or what it has been posting hasn't been all that interesting, I'll demote it. This means I'll read it less often. But if I take another look at it in a few weeks and it's got some good stuff, I'll promote it back to where it was. I use a tag in the Google Reader called "key blogs", this is the one that I check several times a day. I also have more descriptive tags, e.g. "Australian librarians", if I demote a blog from this group, I tag it "Australian librarians01" and so on, 02, 03 etc. That's how I organize it - the hope is that the good rises to the top and the mediocre sinks into obscurity, but being flexible to cope with constant changes in the blogosphere and my own preferences.

I'm not saying that I never unsubscribe to blogs. If a blog really annoys or offends me, I will unsubscribe to it, that's if I don't give it the idiots or z-list tag.

I don't think it's an accident that I developed this method after switching to the Google reader. There's no reason why these ideas couldn't be adapted to work with other readers. Sometimes I still use NetNewsWire. This method could work there, but I'd have to change its preferences to turn off its feature of showing number of unread posts in its dock icon. I've decided that that is not a helpful number. I used to stress about getting it to zero and think I wasted a lot of time and energy doing that. I'd much rather ignore that number and focus on enjoying what I like reading.