Walt at Random

Quickies on a Saturday morning after a 48-hour absence from the net. (I was speaking at Cal State Northridge, opening the CARL-SEAL program “Hot off the press: Insider’s tips for successful publishing”–and thoroughly enjoyed it.)

• At some point during the day (probably during my scattershot opening speech), I noted that, in my opinion, a very high percentage of library-related blogs are worthwhile, and aggregation makes it plausible to keep up with lots of them. (I noted Sturgeon’s Law, “90% of everything is crud,” although I used the more common version ending in “rap” instead of “rud” and argued that while it’s probably true for blogs in general, I don’t think it holds for the biblioblogosphere. I also noted that I currently track 216 library blogs and anticipated that, after being away for 48 hours, I’d find 150 to 200 (I hope I said “to 200”) posts waiting for me, which would take half an hour to an hour to scan. The actual number is 238, and it may take a little longer. Still, 238 in two days is manageable.
• Dorothea Salo thought there might be enough Google Print books to make an egosurf worthwhile. So, of course, I did just as she says: “(Oh, shut up. If you haven’t already done it, you’re going to as soon as you finish reading this post. Maybe sooner.)” I was astonished by the result (none of my books are there, but…), even after adding quotes around the name to eliminate all those mentions of people named Crawford who work for Walt Disney, etc. 26 books, most of which I’ve never heard of… No, I haven’t gone back to look at the snippets yet…
• I was encountering a slow but annoying stream of spamments, all of them trapped by WordPress but requiring modification to report as spam. Today I find 44. So, reluctantly, I’ve had to add yet another word to the total blacklist, relating to a game I’ve even discussed in posts…

Hey, I said it was random.

Updates a day later:

It took me 55 minutes to go through the blogs–but that included the time to make comments on two of them and the time to scan LISNews as well. I think I found 15 posts that were “keepers”–ones I’d print out for possible reflection later. But quite a few others were informative, entertaining, or both.

Some clarification on “26” above. I checked a little more. Most of those–at least two-thirds–really only include me as a co-author; they comment on or include citations for Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness and Reality. Two are books that include chapters or contributions from me. That doesn’t really leave much, and that’s as I’d expect. Note, of course, that (as with Dorothea, I believe), these are all from the publisher-based Google Print program, not the Google Print Library Program.

This work by Walt Crawford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 5th, 2005 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Libraries, Speaking, Travel, Writing and blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.