Thursday, August 11, 2005

Parsing the Biblioblogosphere

Walt Crawford, where do you find the time?

Walt has published his analysis of library related blogs in his latest Cites & Insights (Sept 2005) and I read it in the same way I might read obituaries...a sort of anxious fascination. Where was It's All Good in his analysis? Did IAG beat Lorcan's blog? (Not that we have any rivalry at all you understand).

All kidding aside, I did find Walt's number crunching and gloss interesting....how to quantify the reach and impact (all those citation factors) of library blogs? And I would think that for those bloggers who have a need to justify and display worth to administrators Walt's work will provide both fodder and model. And my gut agreed...the blogs I must read were most of the same high impact ones Walt identifies...and I read many of the blogs with smaller readership because I like the topics, and/or the voice, and/or I know the author...

My personal view is that blogging has brought to life a whole range of voices to our profession and that we are all richer for that. I've been working in libraries since 1975 and many of the names attached to articles or books were just that, names only. In the past few years, blogging and podcasting has given us all the platforms to broadcast widely, informally, and in the true voices of ourselves, the authors.

1 comment:

waltc said...

Did you "beat" Lorcan's blog? Given Lorcan's comment at FRL, what kind of question is that? (I don't use emoticons...)

Where do I find the time? This one ran over three weeks of just-after-work, evening, and weekend time (while work was busier than ever).

Your final paragraph and section of the penultimate one following "..." are exactly what I'm hoping to hear... There's a little part of me that wanted to skip the whole thing, but after 40-50 hours of work, that wasn't going to happen!