IL 2006: Blogging Upate: Applications & Tips

IL 2006: Blogging Upate: Applications & Tips
Aaron Schmidt, Walter Nelson, and Karen Coombs

IL2006

Walter Nelson
Mr. Nelson works for the RAND corporation.  He discussed one of the biggest problems with RSS: very few customers understand RSS, much less use it.  And we have to meet our customers where they are, not where we want them to be. (Yes!)  But if you can embed RSS into webpages, then the users are using RSS without downloading anything or knowing what it is.  You can still, however, have a feed for your power-users.

Moveable Type.  In his opinion, installation is the hard part, but since you only install it on your server once, it's not too horrible.  You can used canned formats you find online, or you can use your skilled webbie to make it look exactly like your website using CSS.  You can even use a blog to be your website, period.  It's very easy to use once it's installed.  The administrator has control over who the authors are, an authors add content with the web interface, not requiring web skills.  It automatically generates RSS feeds too.  Yay!!!  Blogs don't have to be used for journal-style blogging.  You can use them for corporate announcements, event calendars, image databases, online newspapers, etc. 

Feed2JS is freeware.  You can have them host it or install in on your site.  It generates javascript that displays RSS feed content on your webpage.  If you can, install it on your own server so you will have more control over bandwidth and such. 

He showed us the RAND Corporation webpage that has an announcements section showing headlines and excerpts from the RSS feed from a blog.  He also noted some additional uses for RSS feeds--adding external newsfeeds to your website, creating a static "link list' as an RSS feed, have category feeds, which allows you to parse your feeds by subject. 

Karen Coombs
Karen talked about how her library uses blogs to facilitate internal communications.  The library was beginning a strategic planning process and needed a way to communicate and gather information about that process.  At the same time, the library's public website was being redesigned. 

Now they have many different types of blogs for staff: committee blogs, blogs for service points (circulation, reference), and working groups.  The committee blogs allow folks to make announcements post minutes and other committee announcements, and more.  The service points blogs are displayed on the desktops of the various service-point computers, allowing users to see what's new in one-shot (upcoming assignments, FAQs, outages, news).  The blogs for workgroups are similar to the blogs for committees, though form what she said, it seems that these users are using the sharing features more. 

They still have some unresolved issues.  There are feed subscription issues because the blogs are all protected and only accessible from within the library's IP range. The blogs don't fit in really well with the rest of the intranet yet, plus it's not integrated with their existing authentication systems, so users have to remember yet another login and password.  Keeping up with changes to blog permissions is also difficult.

Aaron Schmidt
Aaron started by saying "no one cares that you have a blog."  His point is that you should use blogs as a tool to put content on you website.  It's not about the format, it's about the content that you use it for.  You can use blogs to broadcast not only text content, but audio and video content as well.  The Lamson Library at the Plymouth State University has converted their library catalog to a WordPress blog.  Aaron showed his list of all the DVDs at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library, which he has created in a blog format as well.  wsternSpringshistory.org, photos and data about old historical homes in the area, is built with a blog.

Aaron gave a few tips and tricks for blogging.  Download and use the Flickr upload tool (a small download to your computer).  He pointed out the tools you have available to you in Flickr for each photo, including the ability to blog a photo automatically from Flickr.  Flickr has tools that you can use to display your photos on your website: an HTMl badge or a Flash badge, either is very cool!

The Westmont Library has created a blog for their new materials by taking photos of several new books (covers out) at a time, and creating notes in Fickr noting the title/author and linking back to the catalog.

A new version of Firefox, 2.0, was released today.  It has a built-in spellcheck for anything you type on a webpage. 

Aaron talked about using MeeboMe Widgets on your blog so that people can talk to you, live, anonymously right from your blog pages.

Blog elsewhere: get your content into other parts of the blogosphere.  Contribute to other blogs in your community.  Use this as a PR opportunity! 

Follow Through: have some content planned.  Have new content and post frequently.  If you don't, people will cease to visit your site. 

Blogging is extremely mainstream right now, but libraries were very slow getting on board and the world is starting to move forward without us.