biblio: Thanks. I hope you’re right. (And think you might be.) Since the June Cites & Insights is, after this past weekend, about 99% ready (but won’t be published for 2-4 weeks), I’ve got time enough to see how it goes…

I would suggest that even though the moving is not necessarily taking a lot of time, it IS taking more mental energy than you might think. Moving is stressful. Wait until you’ve settled into your new place before you start thinking that your inspiration is gone and will never come back.

Hee hee.

There exists a business model in giving away free material and monetizing the attention – for example, broadcast TV.

There also exists a business model of trying to convince people they can monetize attention, even if it’s very unlikely – this is “social media consulting”, of which a subset is blog-evangelism.

Since I’m based in New Zealand and don’t get to many North American events to be part of ‘real time’ discussions, I use blogs like yours to keep up with things that are happening there, and would miss your voice if it it vanished. I also read C &I regularly.

Good luck with the move. Buying and selling houses is one of the more stressful things I’ve done, so I’m not surprised you find it hard to focus on writing while it’s taking your time and attention.

For me part of it is the ability to share things through Facebook, FriendFeed etc. I mention an item, jot down a sentence or two and that’s that instead of a more substantive blog post.

As for you, I pretty much agree with everything Mark said. You’re still needed. Someone’s got to innoculate the field against rampant shiny new thing syndrome without coming off as a luddite and I think you do that very well.

But then I go to speak at a conference, like I did yesterday for he Iowa ACRL chapter where I keynoted their annual conference, and it was good to hear folks tell me they enjoyed an article I wrote or the blog posts. That re-energizes me and helps me to know that my writing can inspire or make a difference for those who read it.

In fact, I think getting out to conferences and meeting the people who read your content is a good thing. We connect and it humanizes us – we get to know the readers – they get to know us. We not just words on a web page or a comment.

So even though I’m sometimes uncertain as to whether my writingis still relevant or not, I’ll continue to try to make a difference for the readers.

We haven’t talked in a long time (since your UC days dealing with the data center), but I have been following the library world over the years and more so since I retiring from UC. With my toe trying to get in the current (PT) library job market, I have been using bloglines to understand what is going on in the “library” world.

Anyway, good luck on your house in Livermore (it can be pretty good country there). As for projects, I vote for your offering a publishing for the libraries series.

Frank

I still think with more marketing the books could have done better, but I’m not sure what the sales of library-oriented studies are anyway so that’s just a hunch on my part.

I think Mark’s onto something in terms of argumentation styles and attention spans, but I don’t think that’s just a function of social media and I don’t think it’s a recent trend. And I don’t think it’s an irresistible locomotive of history.

As for whether you still have something to say, that’s your call. I’m not sure how much more I can say on that score without it seeming like either vapid feel-good cheerleading or argument for the sake of argument.

I still think with more marketing the books could have done better, but I’m not sure what the sales of library-oriented studies are anyway so that’s just a hunch on my part.

As for whether you still have something to say, that’s your call. I gu