Welcome to my L2TD blog, likely to be a place of thoughtful and maybe not-so-thoughtful professional observations. For example: "Gee, making a blog is rather fun. Do you think SLQ will think that using their widget is waaaay too obvious as a prize grabber?"
Actually, I found adding a widget to be tricky, Oh! too many choices! How to select a widget that not only looked appealing but gave some cred, and didn't annoy blog visitors with perpetual blinking. Tip: most widgets are faulty or look awful. Choose something simple and/or tasteful.
In theory, blogs are a nifty and fun way of sharing knowledge. In practice, in a professional work environment, there are many, many other considerations that need to be made. These include, but are not limited to:
Privacy - using personal names and work email addresses, supporting the googlebeast in its inexorable data gathering. They know what about my search habits?
Intellectual Property - who actually owns what I'm writing right now, given that it's in the public domain? Me? My department? Googleblogger? Is there a precedent?
Information Security - how compromised is my departmental firewall? What spam can I expect to receive?
Authority of data - web 2.0 really is the ultimate soap box. Any hack can give it a go. There's definitely no admiralty code system of reliability/credibility data assessment going on in this medium. (Do you like the irony that I used a link to Wikipedia? Please be assured that all my data is completely A1)
Negative connotations - no seriously, I AM doing work, I just happen to be social networking.
Bottom line - if library professionals don't stay skilled with new information delivery tools (RSS, blogs, wiki technology et cetera), then we cannot possibly begin to meet clients on ground that is familiar to them. Ergo we are out of touch; clients will go elsewhere to have their information needs satisfied in ways familiar and easy for them. I vote let's stay in touch.
Test drive #1:
- set up blog - complete
- Comment on experience - see above
- Register - shortly
