...but I'll probably order a copy to find out.
As someone in the comments points out, it's a great marketing strategy for a new book on library blogs - mention as many library-related blogs as possible in your book then list them in your index. Put a sample of that index online making it likely that people will find out about your book and have their curiosity piqued.
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Sunday, December 14
I have no idea why my blog is being cited five times...
by
Jason
on Sun 14 Dec 2008 09:11 PM CST
Tuesday, November 11
Remembering Last Remembrance Day
by
Jason
on Tue 11 Nov 2008 02:12 AM CST
It's hard to believe that I've been writing this blog on a nearly daily basis for what, two and a half years now? It's even become another resource tool in my arsenal - I often search my own blog for items and ideas that I know I've written about in the past so that I can re-visit them, now, with the benefit of hindsight or to remember a fact or whatever.
I've also grown to have some posts that are particular favourites for one reason or another. I summarized some of them in a post called "Best Tales" (which badly need updated!) and today, I would like to highlight a post that will go on that "Best of..." list when I do get around to updating it - the post I did last Remembrance Day, a few months after my grandfather passed away. Thursday, July 31
"Family Reunion"- Corb Lund
by
Jason
on Thu 31 Jul 2008 10:11 PM CST
Okay, I'm back up. Almost made it to the end of the month for the bandwidth reset but once again, my massive popularity is my downfall (er, also my crappy host.) ...so posts may be few and far between this weekend. (Who am I kidding? I'll probably live blog the whole thing.)
Tuesday, July 29
This Blog Post Is Titled "Jason Wishes He Had Time To Convert To A Different Provider" - Bandwidth Overages Suck!
by
Jason
on Tue 29 Jul 2008 10:40 PM CST
Nothing to see here - move along!
Monday, June 30
Link to Another Blog That Allows Its Users To Post Libelous Comments - Get Sued Yourself!
by
Jason
on Mon 30 Jun 2008 11:42 PM CST
When Jessamyn West was here for SLA, this topic came up at the after-event gathering. I meant to post something about it at that time when the story was still somewhat fresh but never got to it, being as busy as I was with much more important matters like cute baby pictures and Flash-based Friday Fun Links.
A recent invite to the annual Sask Blogs summer picnic reminded me of the fact that the Sask Blogs Aggregator, a site which creates a rolling summary of posts from various Saskatchewan-based and Saskatchewan-themed blogs, is still down. But I'm getting ahead of myself... In mid-April, a right-wing, Sask-based blog named "Small Dead Animals" posted a link to another conservative site named FreeDominion that had posted a story about Canadian civil rights lawyer, Richard Warman. As with most blogs, FreeDominion accepts comments. Warman saw these and made the claim that the comments were defamatory. He sued but in a unique twist, he didn't just name FreeDominion (which allowed the comments) but also sites that linked to the FreeDominion story such as Small Dead Animals (and therefore, were re-publishing these comments indirectly in his view.) Although the case was still in the works and linking to a third-party site that may contain libelous or defamatory material hadn't yet been defined as legal or illegal by a court, the Sask Blogs aggregator shut down their service completely out of concern that a similar charge could be leveled against them - either for linking to Small Dead Animals or to any of the other dozens of blogs that who were part of their feed and which may contain similar borderline comments which could be actionable. Here's a summary from the Regina Leader-Post of the whole situation. I gotta say, I'm with the right winger on this and think that the civil rights lawyer is stretching too way far. If FreeDominion libeled you or allowed you to be libeled, that's one thing. But suing every single site that links to the story (or links to a site that links to the story - hey, I just realised, because of all the links I've thrown out to the various sites involved in this case, I'm implicated now too! In fact, because of the interconnected nature of the Internet, every possible site that includes links to other sites is guilty as well! Oh-oh - do you know what that means? That's it - shut down the Internet - it's over. Links are no longer allowed!  )Okay, kidding aside, does anyone see the irony in a civil rights lawyer being responsible for an action that's stifled freedom of speech and sharing of information, not only in the original offending site but for numerous harmless bystanders? To me, this is sort of like the copyright issue where someone is trying to apply old-world views of how things work now to a new world. In the old days, yeah, if someone else repeated a libelous statement, they were responsible. But in the Internet age, where a link is a click away, a statement can go out to a million people as easily as to a dozen, the old paradigms simply don't work anymore. "The genie is out of the bottle" is a phrase I think of all the time in situations like this. Warman is trying to corral the spread of whatever libelous statements were made but somewhere, someone is going to be able to access them. That's the new world and we all have to accept that. At any rate, the Sask Blogs aggregator was a great, volunteer service that I miss a lot. I tend to read blogs that are in my narrow areas of interest or written by people I know so Sask Blogs was a simple way for me to get an overview of what people were writing about across the province - from all viewpoints, all writing styles, all geographic locations, all manner of topics from personal to political and everything in between. Hopefully this case will be resolved and Sask Blogs will be back soon. Wednesday, June 25
My Wordle
by
Jason
on Wed 25 Jun 2008 11:24 PM CST
Friday, March 28
Friday Fun Link - 2008 LJ Movers and Shakers (March 28, 2008)
by
Jason
on Fri 28 Mar 2008 09:39 PM CST
A recent post on Librarian.net reminded me that this year's list of Library's Journal's 2008 Movers & Shakers is now out.
Congrats to Amy Buckland for getting the nod! (<old man voice>I remember when Amy was just a wee lass, firing off e-mails to library school-focused blogs asking about the merits of various schools.</old man voice> Obviously I didn't do a good enough sales job for UWO and she landed at McGill. London's loss is Montreal's gain.) Looking at the list of recipients and seeing how many of those named have blogs (and/or are doing work focused on technology and Web 2.0 stuff), it made me wonder what sort of relationship there is between having a blog and the "real world" of libraries? Classmate John Miedema of the Slow Reading blog recently presented at Salt Lake City Public Library's "Thinking Ahead" conference. I'm not sure if his blog was how they found him and/or if it helped lend credibility to his application if he "cold called" them as a potential speaker but I'm sure it didn't hurt. Maybe that's part of it - you need to have a certain specialty or theme that you're "known" for? (See #4 here.) Amy runs Library Student Journal, John has become a leading proponent of the Slow Reading movement. I haven't won any awards or been invited to any conferences because of my blog (yet!  ) but as I recently blogged about, it's been an amazing way to become connected to a wider library community that I wouldn't otherwise have in the pre-Internet days. (Of course, I also have my days when I think bloggers are a lot like poets and professors - namely, a group of people who are mostly interested in what other people in the same area are doing while no one else gives a toss. I've organized enough poetry readings in my life to know that 99% of the people who come to them are other poets. And the citation count wars of academics trying to get their papers cited by other academics often seemed like more of an academic circle jerk than anything.  )Er, anyhow, ranty tangents aside, being a part of the conversation has been useful, even if it hasn't paid off in awards, conference invites or Google-buyout offers. Even something as simple as being able to post the full version of my essay that won second place in the CLA student essay contest last year since CLA didn't have room to print anything but the winner in Feliciter has generated the a couple hits from people who searched for it after the winners were announced last year. And who knows - it may do so into the future as well. And then? That CLA conference invite can't be far off! (How can you tell it's conference season? I'm hoping to go to SLA this year - and to maybe get a chance to meet the famous Jessamyn West of librarian.net and MetaFilter.com - but CLA looks like it's not going to happen, what with the price of diapers and whatnot.) Sunday, March 23
Blog Survey Results
by
Jason
on Sun 23 Mar 2008 12:08 AM CST
I recently
posted the second annual "Head Tale Blog Survey" to find out a bit
about the visitors to this site - how they get here, what they like
about the site, what they want to see more of and so on.
Here are some of the results... - 75% of respondents read the site via RSS with 55% occasionally clicking through to the site and 20% never clicking through. 25% visit directly via a bookmark. - it was pretty evenly split between Google Reader and Bloglines with 60-40% for each respective service. Even though I love it and have raved about it on this blog multiple times, no one uses NetVibes.  - 30% of people read/visit the site when they see a new post, 12% visit multiple times per day, 20% visit daily, 20% visit every few days, 6% visit weekly and 12% visit "whenever the mood strikes me". Nobody answered "monthly or less frequently" but then again, I don't think I've had the post up for a month yet!  - Given that the blog started when I was in library school and is known mostly to people who are either professors, alumni, former colleagues from when I was attending FIMS or current students there now (and the same categories from other library schools to a lesser degree), it's no surprise that "Library related" and "Library school" are, by far, the most popular types of posts being picked by 87% and 73% of respondents. Other popular categories with more than 50% of people picking them were "Work-Related" (a new category I added to the survey this year) and "Miscellaneous Ramblings" (which sort of surprised me as I don't do a lot of these and tend to not like them as they often feel unfocused and random. But hey, didn't I just describe 90% of blogs in general?) - "Baby-related", "Pop Culture", "Technology" and "Humour" were all just under the 50% level in terms of popularity with survey respondents. - Everything else got at least a double-digit approval rating except "Hockey" which only got a 6% approval rating including one person who went so far as to write-in "I like everything you write about except hockey!"  - Sending a strong message to get back to the theme that this blog started with (a message which I may or may not hear!  ),
"Library-related" was not only the most popular category for posts I do
now but also, by far, the category people would like to see more posts
in with 67% of respondents citing it. "Work related" (which you can
probably view as a vote for "library related" in some ways) and
"Miscellaneous ramblings" were the other top vote getters in this
area. - "Comments" were by far the most popular widget with people indicating that they read them, even if they don't post them. Every other widget got at least a vote or two except for the LastFM "last song played" widget and the Regina/Calgary/London weather widget (but I use that one on a daily basis so it ain't going anywhere!) - Maybe surprisingly, 100% of respondents who answered the question liked that this blog has daily posts! (If I remember correctly, last year, it was only a slight majority who thought this was important.) Thanks for the vote of support folks. I'll try to keep it up (even if I have to occasionally "fudge" time stamps the following day to do so!). - the general comments were very supportive of what I do with this blog and it was nice to see that the respondents included a few former classmates/colleagues from FIMS because I didn't know if those folks were still "out there" reading now that we've all gone our separate ways. - Pace got lots of kudos as well and I'm sure he'll continue to be a regular feature on the blog. (Idea for a future post - the security/privacy issues around putting up pictures and updates about him - something I've thought about a lot while doing my computer/Internet training sessions the past three months. I didn't show Shea's Flickr account or our YouTube videos at every workshop but occasionally it would come up and then I often had to explain our choice to put this type of material on the Internet to people who still buy into that media-generated hysteria about pedophiles lurking around every URL and IP address.) - as for ideas for other future posts from the respondents, I can address this one right now: "Will a Large Hadron Collider experiment create a mini black hole that consumes the earth? Or, do aliens blog more than humans?" Answer: Uhm, no idea. And also, no idea. (Next time, I'm going to include a question about what you're smoking when you fill out the survey!  ) Saturday, March 15
Link Dump (and Blog Survey Reminder)
by
Jason
on Sat 15 Mar 2008 01:42 AM CST
Just clearing up some things I've come across recently. I sometimes forget to make a note of where I found stuff so if I got this from you or your site, apologies in advance - feel free to post a comment or drop me a line to let me know (although admittedly 90% of my stuff tends to come from Reddit these days so you can usually find the discussion for these sites there by doing a search on the relevant topic.)
Also, this is a good place to remind you that my annual blog survey is open right now. If you haven't already, please take a quick moment to fill out the 10 questions (most of which are checkboxes - can it get any easier?) Thanks to everyone who's taken the time to respond so far. I can only make educated guesses as to who's reading this blog from the various programs I have tracking traffic to this site. So it's especially nice to see responses from former classmates and colleagues at FIMS when I wasn't sure if they were still "tuning in". On to the links... Bookshelf Blog BookShelves By Colour R.E.M. to debut new album on the social networking application, iLike The World's 50 Most Powerful Blogs And for the survey respondent who said "Pace rocks - more Pace!", here you go...   Tuesday, March 11
2008 Head Tale Blog Survey
by
Jason
on Tue 11 Mar 2008 09:49 PM CST
I did a blog survey last year which was very informative about who's reading my blog, how they get here and how often they visit, what they like once they get here and what they'd like to see more of. For that reason, I've decided to repeat the survey again this year.
I thank-you in advance for taking a few short minutes to fill out the survey. I don't think I posted the results last year but I think I'll do so this year (mainly because I'm always desperate for content!  ) |
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