This article is from the May 2004 issue of Update.
A previous article in Update1 introduced weblogs mainly as a professional awareness service. Here I want to look briefly at them more widely as an information resource and as a library service, as well as considering the related RSS newsfeed technology that can enhance their use.
To recap. A weblog, or blog, is a regularly updated web page, usually created by one person, often very personal, usually in a chronological diary format and normally created with special software. Entries are brief and it might be updated every few hours or merely every few days. Content is topical and blogs can have a particular viewpoint, and even personality.
Commonly a blog is an autobiographical, often daily, account of activities, sometimes interesting (such as Memex 1.12 by academic and journalist John Naughton) but often of limited value, since anyone can publish their views, however mundane, whether of wider interest or not. More useful can be those that comment or report on public issues, like that of the Baghdad Blogger,3 who started reporting during the Iraq invasion but is still blogging, or The War in Context: a daily record of America’s post-9/11 impact on the world,4 that pulls material in from various news sources. These can be seen as journalism and there are those who argue this is the way journalism should go, with anyone able to contribute without editorial interference, relying on peer review as a quality control. Other news-related blogs may have specialist content, e.g. Economic Development Futures (‘information and insights about where economic development is headed’)5 and the Google Weblog,6 which is about, but not by, Google.
Many blogs are a list of interesting journal articles, blog pieces, websites, etc — maybe in a subject area, and maybe with comments — the compiler has come across, e.g. Dan Gillmor’s eJournal on Technology (‘news, views and a Silicon Valley diary’)7 or Things Magazine (‘new writing about objects, their pasts, presents and futures’).8 Others can be lists of new web resources, e.g. engineering materials learning resources from the UK Centre for Materials Education9 or Marylaine Block’s long-established Neat New Stuff I Found on the Web This Week.10
Features normally found in a blog include an archive of past items (that may be searchable) and the ability for readers to comment on blog entries. Comments can be extensive. There can be links to related blogs or merely to those the author finds interesting. Entries may appear in categories.
Finding and searching weblogs
There are numerous general directories of weblogs like Blogarama11 (nearly 8,000 blogs listed as I write) and guides that list directories (Fagan Finder: weblogs, journals and RSS).12 Both Yahoo Directory13 and Open Directory14 have appropriate sections too. Directories will allow browsing by subject and a search by descriptions.
Major search services like Google and alltheweb and more specialist ones like Daypop (news)15 will include weblog content in their search results, though there have been concerns that search results can be dominated by blog entries, overshadowing more useful web pages. Personally I haven’t found that a problem.
Looking more closely at library applications there are three main ways to use blogs: personal use by librarians for updating; as resources to point users to; and as a way of providing information about libraries and services.
Blogs by librarians have been established longer in the US, where one like Gary Price’s ResourceShelf,16 of new resources and articles, is required reading — often he seems to know about new UK resources before they get mentioned here. However, there are an increasing number of useful blogs of UK origin — such as Paul Pedley’s Keeping Legal17 on legal issues affecting information work, Sheila Webber’s Information Literacy Weblog18 or Update columnist Phil Bradley’s more personal one.19 You can even find some by systems librarians on work in progress, such as Mike Gardner’s Metalib Stuff.20
Peter Scott from the University of Saskatchewan Library maintains a list of library weblogs from around the world.21 He also produces his own blog on library events and activities and has the Weblogs Compendium,22 with wide-ranging information on blogs and RSS, including news, tools and directories.
Libraries should be guiding users to appropriate weblogs, as they do for websites or discussion lists, though identifying those of value is more difficult since the proportion of ‘serious’ ones is lower. A rough first filter might be to ignore those with odd titles, like Powered by Hate Vodka and Greed! Guidance is likely to be largely to those with a clear focus, rather than the more personal eclectic ones, though it’s hard to be dogmatic about this, as it depends on the audience.
Libraries with blogs
There are still few libraries in the UK with their own blogs, with Gateshead’s pioneering Et Cetera23 the best known. Library blogs can have a variety of purposes depending on the intended audience. It is important to assess needs first and ensure that a blog is the appropriate form of communication. Possibilities here can be to:
- direct users to useful, new or interesting resources;
- comment on local and national events and activities in the IT, book and library worlds;
- provide news from the library/information service; and
- request feedback or comments and generally help the library to engage with its users, especially those who rarely if ever visit a physical library.24
It is important to keep changing the content to retain the interest of readers. While we tend to think of blogs as public phenomena, this does not have to be the case. Restriction to an intranet is quite possible if confidentiality is an issue.
The key factor that makes blogging so popular is that creating a blog is easy and, unlike producing web pages, requires no HTML skills. The software used will provide templates with various designs to choose from, enabling a blog to be created within a few minutes. Users with HTML skills can modify these — change colours, add a logo, change layout — or even create their own template. Blog entries are usually created by entering text in a box; there may also be simple ways of creating hyperlinks or giving some formatting to the text. Software can be used on a local web server or created by the provider and either hosted by them or the pages FTP’d to a local server. Software can be free — with adverts — or charged at a few dollars a month for more features and no ads. Some organisations prefer to create their own software.
So technically there’s no reason for an organisation of whatever size not to blog — the ease of use means contributions don’t have to be limited to those with great IT confidence, and in some organisational blogs the content can come from a range of people. If you want to pursue your own blog then the directories above list blogging software — give some of the free ones a try.
Newsfeeds and RSS
You can read, and bookmark, blogs like any web page, and some are available by email, but if you want to monitor many it can be easier to make use of newsfeeds to access them. These use RSS (RDF Site Summary or Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication — take your pick) technology.25, 26 This is an XML (Extensible Markup Language) tag for a page that allows the content or headlines of a weblog or other news sites to be pulled automatically into other web pages. Thus you might see a website that includes headlines from the BBC with links to the full stories.
Newsfeeds or news aggregators are services that use RSS to allow you to receive, within one page, many of these sources. These could be additions to blogs, or to other changeable sites like directories of websites or learning materials, local and national newspapers, broadcast news, specialist subject newsletters and so on. News available might be quite specific, such as BBC news on e-commerce. You choose the sources you want from the list of the thousands available to the service and see the latest headlines — and sometimes the text — from your chosen ones. Headlines will be updated regularly, with the latest shown each time you log in. You can also add other sources you come across that are not listed. (An orange XML or RSS icon on a website shows a feed is available.) An aggregator may be software you download and install on to your PC, like Amphetadesk27 and FeedReader28 or a web-based service like Bloglines,29 MyFeedster,30 NewsIsFree31 and Syndic8,32 that can be used from anywhere. Some will allow you to search the content of just your blogs or of all in the service. You can often add these searches as another of your sources to be updated along with the rest. Some aggregators can alert you by email when there is new material available. This is fine for saved searches and some blogs, but not recommended for rapidly changing sites like BBC news! Indeed it’s too easy to get overwhelmed by material when you just add one more source that looks interesting, and then another. And if you miss checking for a few days you could have hundreds of items to look at, so you might need to be firm about what you read.
Newsfeeds tend to be used personally rather than as a library service, but there are some aggregators in specialist areas, for example EEVL OneStep Jobs,33 which collects together technology job recruitment ads from many online sources. These aggregators might well be included in a specialist web page or institutional portal. Libraries could explore setting up feeds for blogs of particular interest to their community, either individually or using an aggregator to bring together a group of related feeds. Publishers are developing contents services using RSS, so there is clearly potential there for new services to users.
This has been a hurried overview, but follow some of the references, see what others are doing and consider whether your services could benefit from the ‘blogging revolution’!
References
1 H. D’Aguiar. ‘Weblogs: the new internet community?’ Library + Information Update, 2(1), January 2003, pp.38-39.
2 www.skillbytes.co.uk/memex/
3 http://dearraed.blogspot.com/
4 www.warincontext.org/
5 www.don-iannone.com/edfutures/
6 http://google.blogspace.com/
7 http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/
8 www.thingsmagazine.net/
9 www.materials.ac.uk/resources/newupdated.asp
10 http://marylaine.com/neatnew.html
11 www.blogarama.com/
12 www.faganfinder.com/blogs/
13 http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet
/World_Wide_web/weblogs/
14 www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/On_the_web/
weblogs/
15 www.daypop.com/
16 www.resourceshelf.com/
17 www.keepinglegal.com/
18 http://ciquest.shef.ac.uk/infolit/
19 www.philb.com/blog/blogger.html
20 www.nottingham.ac.uk/~uazmjg/metalib/
21 www.libdex.com/weblogs/
22 www.lights.com/weblogs/
23 www.libraryweblog.com/
24 D. Fichter. ‘Why and how to use blogs to promote your library’s services.’ Marketing Library Services, 17(6), 2003,
pp.1-4 (www.infotoday.com/mls/nov03/fichter.shtml).
25 Ukoln. ‘RDF Site Summary — RSS’ (www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/resources/rss/).
26 M. Moffat. ‘RSS — a primer for publishers and
content providers.’ EEVL, 2003 (www.eevl.ac.uk/rss_primer/).
27 www.disobey.com/
28 www.feedreader.com/
29 www.bloglines.com/
30 www.feedster.com/myfeedster.php
31 www.newsisfree.com/
32 www.syndic8.com/
33 www.eevl.ac.uk/onestepjobs/
Ian Winship is Electronic Services Manager, Learning Resources Department, Northumbria University (ian.winship@unn.ac.uk). For news on blogs and RSS see the Blogorama section in the monthly Internet Resources Newsletter (www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/).