Thoughts on blogging: if there's really a blog born overy half second, there's got to be a lot of dreck being posted - but also a lot of interesting stuff.
A friend turned me on to a blogger who writes about everyday life in Cuba. While not overtly political, her posts about the day-to-day privations and restrictions constitute a pretty damning picture of the regime. Yoani's blog is translated into English and several other languages by volunteers, and sometimes the translation is a little rough. She recently won an award from the Columbia School of Journalism.
I spent a lot of time looking at the blogs posted on the Explorations #2 page. I was somewhat familiar with the Merlin page, since I've used it for accessing training info. It was fun ezxploring their links to other librrary blogs. It looks like lots of MD libraries are using blogs to communicate with patrons, with what seems to be with varying degrees of success. Many are not updated regularly (and with budget cuts across the board, who can spare the time and staff) but it seems crucial that if we expect these to be used by our patrons they have to be both interesting and timely.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Monday, September 14, 2009
Exploration No. 1
OK, OK, it's been months since I initially set up this blog and haven't posted since. Yes, I am a procrastinator!
My first thought about the video ("The Machine is Us/ing/Us) - we need more bandwidth if we're really serious about embracing Web2.0! This simple 4:34 clip took about 4X that amount of time to fully load into my pc. Once I was finally able to watch it it hough, I thought it was an effective way of getting across the idea that web2.0 technologies are linking people ( "using the machine" and not the other way around) and enabling them to share, trade and collaborate. Wesch's idea that we "need to rethink copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, privacy, commerce" seemed to me to be dead on. Gotta say he lost me though we he said we also need to rethink "love, family, ourselves" - seems a bit hyperbolic, no?
So where do librarians stand in all of this? Some thought-provoking ideas in Michael Stephen's article. His contention is that future libraries will be guided by how their users "access, consume and create content". We need to be fluent in the ways they will be doing this and be able to act as tour guides to all the content available to them.
My first thought about the video ("The Machine is Us/ing/Us) - we need more bandwidth if we're really serious about embracing Web2.0! This simple 4:34 clip took about 4X that amount of time to fully load into my pc. Once I was finally able to watch it it hough, I thought it was an effective way of getting across the idea that web2.0 technologies are linking people ( "using the machine" and not the other way around) and enabling them to share, trade and collaborate. Wesch's idea that we "need to rethink copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, privacy, commerce" seemed to me to be dead on. Gotta say he lost me though we he said we also need to rethink "love, family, ourselves" - seems a bit hyperbolic, no?
So where do librarians stand in all of this? Some thought-provoking ideas in Michael Stephen's article. His contention is that future libraries will be guided by how their users "access, consume and create content". We need to be fluent in the ways they will be doing this and be able to act as tour guides to all the content available to them.
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