Published by rwatstein November 2nd, 2008
in blogs and education.
Hugh McGuire writes: “I’m taking a Media Theory course at Concordia in their media studies master’s program, which involves a fair bit of reading. I’ve come to the conclusion that all academics should blog. Here’s why.” Reason no. 2: “Some of your ideas are dumb. The sooner you get called out on bad ideas, the better. When you have a good idea, you’ll hear about it; when you have an incomplete idea, and some others chip in with suggestions, you’ll get a better-formed idea.”
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Published by rwatstein October 25th, 2008
in blogs and journalism.
Paul Bradshaw writes: “Blogs have become part of the editorial furniture. As of this year, 70% of U.S. newspapers, 85% of UK news organizations, and 44% of European news organizations were offering journalist-authored blogs, and all the signals from editors and management suggested these figures would continue to rise. To consider whether journalists feel that blogging has affected their working processes, an online survey was distributed in June and July 2008. Perhaps the most significant change was in the way that blogs provided a platform for stories or detail that would otherwise not make the print or broadcast version at all.”
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Steven Bell writes: “Let’s say you are a librarian and decide you want to have a well-known blog. With the field as crowded as it is, how do you get noticed? What do you need to do to make it to the A—or even the B or C—list? Maybe you just want a blog that uniquely covers some new, unknown territory. I got to thinking about these things because a newer-to-the-profession academic librarian recently posed these questions to me.”
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Published by rwatstein October 12th, 2008
in blogs.
Many designer WordPress themes are good but few are one of a kind. The choice is wide enough, but searching for new themes can be a challenge. Noupe presents 15 free premium-like WordPress themes that you might want to use for your next project. All have been released over the last few months
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Published by rwatstein October 12th, 2008
in blogs, search and Google.
Marshall Kirkpatrick writes: “In its first major upgrade ever, Google Blog Search just relaunched and looks radically different. Instead of the blank page look of Google.com, Blogsearch now looks like Google News (but uglier), with the hottest topics from the blogosphere aggregated on the front page. Readers can drill down in 11 different categories, from technology, business, sports, and entertainment. Google says you can use Blogsearch to see what the world is talking about.”
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Published by rwatstein October 5th, 2008
in blogs and education.
Blogging can be an effective tool for learning, but its benefits shouldn’t be taken for granted. It takes careful planning and skillful management to make it work in an educational setting. Here are five of the most common mistakes for instructors to avoid when incorporating blogs into instruction.
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Published by rwatstein October 5th, 2008
in blogs and Technorati.
Since 2004, Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere reports have analyzed the trends around blogs and blogging. For the 2008 study, the company wanted to go beyond the numbers to deliver insights into bloggers and the state of blogging today. In addition to analyzing the data from the Technorati Index, for the first time, it surveyed bloggers to understand the role of blogging in their lives; tools, time, and resources used for their blogs; and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially.
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Read the 2008 State of the Blogosphere Report here
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Published by rwatstein July 12th, 2008
in blogs and corporations.
There are lots of organizations out there who are starting corporate blogs — and many of those blogs get a less-than-stellar reception from their potential audiences. Why does this happen? Why don’t people want to read a particular blog? Well, I’d suggest there are certain things people want to see in a corporate blog.
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Published by rwatstein June 21st, 2008
in blogs.
Blogging has gone mainstream. What was once a quirky hobby based on sharing intimate details with the world has morphed into something used by major corporations and media outlets. “It seems like every company has a blog section of its own, and is also interested in what the blogosphere is saying about it,” said Paul Verna, senior analyst at eMarketer. “TMZ is considered a blog, but it competes for business with People magazine and other celebrity-focused media.”
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Published by rwatstein May 26th, 2008
in blogs, television and trends.
How a wunderkind producer, seven tabloid-ready stars, an army of bloggers, and a nation of texting tweenagers are changing the way we watch television.
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Published by rwatstein May 4th, 2008
in web 2.0, blogs, education and wiki.
Web 2.0 tools sure are nifty and ‘next-gen,’ but are they actually making a difference in the way students and educators collaborate? Everyone seems to have a different definition for “Web 2.0,” but most people agree the phrase describes a second generation of web-based communities and hosted services that aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users. Technically speaking, these new technologies include blogs, wikis, folksonomies (collaborative or social tagging), and social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us. In the business world, these technologies enable colleagues in different offices to work together on projects, and thus move those efforts ahead quickly and more easily than traveling to an in-person meeting or even teleconferencing. In higher education, however, achieving measurable results with these tools is a bit more challenging. And maybe that’s because-for the academic community, at least-questions continue to swirl around the use of these technologies. Questions such as: What do these tools bring to the table? How can educators be certain students will use them? How does restructuring a curriculum around Web 2.0 actually make a difference in how students learn? Across the country, as more and more colleges and universities consider embracing Web 2.0, the educators and technologists involved feel a certain amount of trepidation, and even ponder the future of the movement.
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Published by rwatstein March 3rd, 2008
in blogs.
Frank Rose writes: “You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you’ve written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested. Here’s how the whole process goes down.”…
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Published by rwatstein February 18th, 2008
in blogs, publishing and journals.
Marcus Banks writes: “I’ve became firmly convinced that the traditional journal model is antiquated for sharing research and knowledge among librarians. A better course is to develop and nurture excellent blogs, with multimedia capabilities and guaranteed preservation of the postings. This could be an entirely new blog that starts from scratch, or an established journal that evolves into a blog.”
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Published by rwatstein February 18th, 2008
in blogs and publishing.
Publisher linking services provider CrossRef has announced that it has launched the beta version of a new plug-in that allows bloggers to look up and insert DOI-enabled citations in the course of authoring a blog. The tool allows the blogger to use a widget-based interface to search CrossRef metadata using citations or partial citations.
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Published by rwatstein December 29th, 2007
in blogs and virtual worlds.
The author tour, with its accompanying readings and signings, has come to be the quintessential tool for promoting books. It is a chance for writers to charm their readers and for readers to glimpse the person behind the words. At its best, the meeting can be electric. (At worst, nobody shows up.) But in the past five years or so, observers say the traditional author tour has been in decline: Fewer writers are being sent out, and those who do tour make fewer stops. Among the many reasons for this shift are marketing tools that have made it possible to orchestrate a virtual encounter, without the hassle or expense of travel. Publishers and authors are now touting books through podcasts, film tours, blog tours, book videos, and book trailers.
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Say “librarian blogger,” and most people would probably imagine a tech-savvy person in his/her late 20s or early 30s, working in a technology-oriented area of the field. They might assume that bloggers are low on the career ladder and relatively new to the profession. They even might think that people who blog don’t publish in the professional literature. While this may describe some bloggers, a survey this author conducted of 839 blogging librarians depicts a much more diverse and rapidly growing population.
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Published by rwatstein December 16th, 2007
in blogs and demographics.
Judging by the sheer number of posts, it’s Japanese. Frequent blogging —often by commuters on mobile phones— has the Japanese the most prolific posters in the world. More blog posts were made in Japanese than English during the past three years, according to Technorati data cited in a Washington Post article. That is despite the almost 5:1 ratio of English to Japanese speakers worldwide.
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So who are the 25 most popular library bloggers? Online Education Database (OEDb), an Internet resource for online colleges, continuing education, and distance learning, announced its Top 25 libloggers based on visitor traffic and site backlinks. Predicably, the results have stirred contention and criticism. To calculate the rankings, OEDb tallied each site’s Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati Authority, and Bloglines subscribers. Among other criteria, a blog had to be listed on the DMOZ open-directory page Library and Information Science: Weblogs; written by a librarian, or listed in the top 200 results for a Google search for “librarian blog.” These metrics narrowed the list to 55 blogs. Nearly half made the final cut.
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Published by rwatstein November 12th, 2007
in blogs and news.
Readers of The New York Times technology section will now get their news from a media outlet that practices what it has been preaching. The paper announced a Web 2.0 makeover for its technology section, which will now deliver blog-style reporting with updates throughout the day.
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The Online Education Database blog ranks the top librarian bloggers.
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Published by rwatstein September 15th, 2007
in blogs and Technorati.
Technorati announced the addition of “Technorati Topics” to the home page and Technorati Topics landing pages. These topics are a way for Technorati to create a simpler category system for blogs they index. Technorati Topics are presented on the home page and updated dynamically as new blog posts or stories are updated on these blogs. Only content from the “best blogs” are shown in the Technorati Topics. Some of the Technorati Topics include Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life.
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Published by rwatstein September 15th, 2007
in blogs and government.
IBM’s e-Government Series has published a ~100-page report titled The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0. The report relates blogging activities by members of Congress, governors, city mayors, and police and fire departments including a case study and lessons learned. This Dr. Dobb’s article includes a link to the report (and comments from readers):
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Published by rwatstein September 15th, 2007
in blogs.
For U.S. bloggers in particular, blogging has become a veritable land mine of potential legal issues, and the situation isn’t helped by the fact that the law in this area is constantly in flux. This article highlights 12 of the most important U.S. laws related to blogging and provides some simple and straightforward tips for safely navigating them.
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Published by rwatstein June 25th, 2007
in blogs and sources.
In the age of the Internet, everyone’s an expert, complains Michael Gorman, the 2005-2006 president of the American Library Association, but few actually have the credits to back it up—and now Gorman’s blogging his critique. Gorman famously made similar charges in print, in a 2004 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, “Google and God’s Mind”, and then an essay in Library Journal in which he harshly criticized bloggers’ responses to his op-ed and notoriously called blogs forums for “the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar…” No, Gorman—who last year retired as dean of the library at California State University, Fresno—hasn’t set up a blog of his own but rather has joined for the Web 2.0 Forum of the Encyclopedia Britannica Blog.
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