Comments on: A really big look at liblogs: Good idea or waste of time?

By: walt

walt — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:05:29 +0000

bowerbird–

Thanks for that. If I do this project, I do indeed think I’ll “extract some juice.” (Question is, how many people will I anger in the process?)

And I’ll take “smart old fellow” as a compliment, even though, after finishing a 2-week cruise on Holland America, I don’t currently think of myself as “old”–on HAL, 62 is somewhere between young and middle-aged by comparison!

Still haven’t decided; still won’t until July at the earliest…

By: bowerbird

bowerbird — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:08:30 +0000

walt-

you know what? i think i’ve changed my mind.

i think an analysis from you would be _both_
interesting _and_ important simply because
you’ve spent a lot of time doing this research,
and — given that you’re a smart old fellow –
i believe that means you’ll extract some juice.

-bowerbird

By: Steven Kaye

Steven Kaye — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:03:44 +0000

I’m (selfishly) curious about the other corporate libloggers out there, and curious how much blogging goes on that’s not “Meme of the moment” (degreed professionals vs. non-degreed, how much handholding to do in training, etc.).

More that sort of stuff than posting/commenting activity and trends, though it would be interesting to see how that varied by type of liblogger possibly.

By: walt

walt — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:09:34 +0000

Thanks for the responses so far. I’m not going to comment, because I’m still gathering comments, and will be for at least a week or two more before making any decisions.

By: John Dupuis

John Dupuis — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:44:40 +0000

I agree with bowerbird and others that, at this point, a quantitative analysis would probably be more interesting than useful. However, I also think that some sort of qualitative analysis could be important as well as interesting. Perhaps using Balanced Libraries as a model rather than the Public and Academic Libraries Blogs books.

By: bowerbird

bowerbird — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:30:43 +0000

walt, i believe it would be very _interesting_
(because _process_ is always fascinating),
but that it won’t be _important_, long-term
(because we will end up in the same place,
whether we’re aware of the journey or not)…

-bowerbird

By: Shaunna Mireau

Shaunna Mireau — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:12:21 +0000

I hope you undertake this huge project. It would be a very useful metric to add to your previous work on this.

By: Jon Gorman

Jon Gorman — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:07:18 +0000

I’ll have to side with Christina here. I think highlighting a few blogs that you like or ones you’ve discovered that don’t seem to have the readership you think they should might be valuable.

A big level analysis is less interesting to me. The diversity of many blogs makes it difficult to decide what to do with that information. I’m not sure what trends would be useful for me either as a professional or as someone interested in the subject matter of blogs. To some extent, I am more interested in data on print materials, if only due to the expense factors.

Of course, I tend not to like some of the more popular blogs, although I’ll read them to keep abreast of what is being covered. I tend to read more of the blogs towards middle. I honestly haven’t been keeping up. If I wanted to add more blogs, I’d probably avoid more library ones and look for more in software engineering or information retrieval. And again in those cases, I don’t want a big overview, just some good blogs.

I guess there’s one big overview type of thing that might be interesting, the amount of duplicate information. There seems to be several blogs that all just will cycle around posts. So person A will post and B, C, D, and E will comment on it. Seeing these types of connections and how they correspond to the social and professional networks would be interesting. But that’s much more an anthropological question. In any case, I’m babbling.

By: T Scott

T Scott — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:46:22 +0000

The comparisons would be interesting. I’ve had the impression the past few months that there’s been quite a shift among that universe of liblogs over the course of the past year or so — while more blogs have been started, it seems as if the overall intensity of discussion has lessened considerably. I don’t have any real data, but it feels as if there are fewer posts per blog and less discussion on the topics that come up. But I don’t know how much of that is a reflection of my own shifting interests and the fact that I continually add and drop feeds. It seems to me that the intense enthusiasm for blogging that we saw a few years ago has died down — lots of people have started blogs, but they run out of things to say fairly quickly, or, after a time, their interests shift and they don’t find the time for posting anymore. But like I say, that’s just an impression — if you did the study it might provide some concrete evidence for whether that impression is accurate or not.

By: Christina Pikas

Christina Pikas — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:38:22 +0000

I’m not sure how much it is valuable to talk in such general terms about liblogs. We have one thing in common, but what else? I’m not sure all of that work is going to pay off, to be honest. To me, highlighting more interesting things in smaller samples would be more interesting.