Tales of a Librarian

There have been many news articles published today discussing the growth of the ‘blogosphere’, with a ‘State of the Blogosphere’ post yesterday on the technorati blog, which reports on the growth in the number of blogs, and developments that have taken place with regards to preventing spamming and increasing the use of tags.

According to technorati, the size of the blogosphere is doubling every five and a half months! Technorati founder, Dave Sifry comments “At that rate, it is literally impossible to read everything that is relevant to an issue or subject, and a new challenge has presented itself - how to make sense out of this monstrous conversation, and how to find the most interesting and authoritative information out there.”

At least I am not the only one who feels overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information available through blogs etc.!! I think another problem in terms of searching through blogs using a site such as technorati is somehow sorting the wheat from the chaff, you know, finding a reputable, timely and intelligent source of information that is going to provide you with the information you want, and some guarantee of the quality of information presented and that the source of information won’t suddenly disappear.

There are a lot of really good blogs out there, and they are an amazing way of keeping up to date with a whole range of issues, themes, areas of interest etc. But at the same time there is also a lot of rubbish. Personally, I would like to see some kind of catalogue (or catablog!! heehee!) of reputable, reliable blogs in different subject areas. It would be great if someone could perhaps classify them as well, kind of like the way in which web resources have been catalogued by BUBL. I appreciate the difficulties that this would entail, but i think that the benefits could be enormous. I doubt somehow that my own wee blog here would be suitable material, but blog owners could apply to be included or something, and then they could be assessed in various ways and included if they were deemed to be appropriate and included enough content (and were likely to continue doing so). Users could comment on the timeliness, reliability, usefulness etc. of the blog so that quality could be gauged.

I guess something like this could be done more practically on a smaller scale, say for example, as part of a reading list for a particular subject at university, or items of interest for a library, hospital or any other organisation. In fact, it could be something that a library could incorporate into it’s catalogue of resources (again, quality of content would become increasingly important).

But well, it’s an idea, because i know from personal experience that finding blogs can sometimes be a really arduous procedure, and i think that most of the ones to which i have subscribed i have mostly stumbled across haphazardly in one way or another. So, as a librarian my natural tendency is to seek some kind of order and organisation!! I wonder if it will ever take off? if it does, and it hasn’t been thought of already, I’m calling dibs on the idea (and the profits!!)
;)

Technorati Tags: library, catalogue, cataloguing, blogs, blogging, blogosphere

Reading Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog and I came across an interesting post about a pdf presentation by Geoff Harder about RSS feeds/readers.

It’s really interesting, particularly his description of NADD (Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder) and RII (Repetitive Information Injury). I’m sure there are a few of us who identify with these conditions!! I spend a lot of time looking through my rss feeds in newsgator - Lorcan himself reports subscribing to around 150 feeds - and admits that it is impossible to keep up with them all. I myself currently subscribe to around 25, which seems piddly in comparison - and even then I feel hard pushed to read everything that comes through it.

Anyways, both the post and the presentation are well worth a nosy…

A survey by Information World Review (yes, I’m just in the process of reading it as you probably guessed!), has found that when readers were asked to rate six named blogs with relevance to information professionals the vast majority of readers viewed them with indifference. When asked if they read the following blogs, each blog’s readership was only around 20% of the respondents. (Blogs included were: Lorcan Dempsey’s Libraries; Martin De Saulles Reuse of Public Sector Information; K G Schneider Free Range Librarian; Peter Scott’s Library; Peter Suber’s Open Access; and Steve Wood’s Freedom of Information Act) . (From Information World Review, Issue 219, pg.15)

They claim that if this is representative of the UK as a whole, then 4 out of every 5 information professionals are not tuning into the ‘blogging phenomenon’. I have to admit that I am sceptical of these results, as I have for the past few weeks been scanning the net for various library/information related blogs and newsfeeds, and in that time I have only come across two of the six blogs mentioned above. I have, however, encountered numerous others, as well as a great number of interesting and relevant newsfeeds which I am keeping up to date with. Perhaps choosing only six blogs as representing the vast numbers of those available was a mistake in this instance, and not entirely representative of the profession as a whole. It also suggests that there may very well be a problem with ensuring that relevant blogs reach the desired target audiences - how exactly do you find these blogs if they are not listed by search services such as technorati or google blog search??