See You Later, Aggregator

I like aggregators like Bloglines a lot. At least in theory. I have a Google Reader account which sits on my iGoogle page. I see it everyday. And yet, somehow, I forget to look at it until I'm overwhelmed by the number of posts I'm behind on.

I suppose for me it's a case of my intentions being so much bigger than the time I've got to accomplish them in. Between my various email accounts, my facebook postings and those of my friends and our online games, and print magazines and whatever book I'm reading there just isn't enough time.

But I do love the concept. The blog posts come to you. You can read at a glance what they're about and decide to read on or skip. And it's just so darned easy to sign up for just one more.

In fact, many of the blogs I was interested in subscribing to had "Bloglines" subscription buttons, which made it very easy to sign up.

Using Google Blog Search was okay. Like all searching in Google, I found the success of your results depends on your search terms. In looking for blogs to add, there were a few blogs I knew about and could search for them fairly specifically and they were easy enough to find. Then I decided to find a random blog on each of two topics of personal interest. The number of blogs returned were huge and it took some sorting through them to find something that appealed to me. I had to sample them to find a voice and choice of topics that I found interesting. If I had had a clearer idea of what I was looking for, it might have been an easier search. But the serendipity of it was fun. And I know I can always sign up for more....

(uh oh)

Hello World (Again)

This is not my first blog post, nor my first blog, for that matter. At one time, when blogging was new, it was part of my daily life.

A couple of years ago I created a blog for the reference department in my public library. I remember the reference staff and I used it to communicate with each other. We had limited the blog so that only we could see and contribute to it and so we passed along our daily concerns, reminders, jokes, encouragements and updates on ongoing professional sagas.

At the height of the blog's use I remember we had a collection graphic files, a bathing suit, a snowflake, etc. When someone began their shift at the desk, they published one of the pictures on the blog as indicator of the local temperature around the reference desk so if you hadn't come into work yet you would know whether to the sleeveless top or the heavy sweater was the proper choice. It was fun and we all enjoyed being bloggers.

I don't remember when we stopped blogging as a department or why. It was a quick, easy, and fun way to communicate. We all had access and we had privacy, too.

I routinely read several professional blogs, such as Librarian in Black http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/, though mostly now I have them come to me either in my email or through an rss feed.

I love to knit and find knitters' blogs to be a great source of free patterns, advice and tips. I don't read any particular knitting blogs regularly, but prefer to dip into them by searching for what I'm after.

At the Internet Librarian Conference held in Monterey, CA last year Twitter was the hot application. Lots and lots of sessions were devoted to Twitter and people sat in the sessions and tweeted about what was being said.

I'm not sure about it for myself, though I do like the status updates on Facebook.