Some interesting points came up in this week’s readings, one of which (photoblogging) I’ve already mentioned in a previous post (and I now have a new addiction – following photoblogs).
The Long Tail
In Blogs in Plain English, the commentator said that blogs appeal to a high number of small audiences, referring (without explicitly saying so) to the Long Tail (which also came up in last week’s readings). If you don’t know much about the Long Tail here is an interesting article in Wired magazine by Chris Anderson. In it, he uses the example of Amazon which combines “infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion. The result: rising demand for an obscure book.” I find this concept fascinating – that now people with obscure interests have ways of accessing the material they are interested in – think zip.ca (or Netflix) or amazon.ca. As a marketing tool, it has amazing potential: “the average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles” (that long tail of demand). Now – you ask – how can we use this in libraries? Well, honestly, I don’t know the answer because, unlike Amazon, we don’t have infinite shelf space (for the really obscure titles Amazon doesn’t even hold the title, they order it from the publisher when you request it – just in time bookselling). Any ideas how we can take advantage of the long tail in libraries?
Blog Criticism
I also enjoyed Jill Walker’s article “Weblogs: Learning in Public”. It had many interesting points but the one that intrigued me most was that many people have an assumption that they can analyze and criticize blogs just like any other creative output. However, when we do, we come to realize that we (as bloggers) are on the same level as the material that we are reviewing (so different from the print book review), that we will often get a response and sometimes hurt people’s feelings. Just another reason to tread lightly. I am very aware of these things (although I have to say I am with her students who were very surprised that anyone outside their class might read their blogs) and I might be engaged in a kind of (what I consider sensible) self-censorship. Does that mean that, as according to Lindy Dreyer and Maddie Grant (in their article on why people don’t comment on blogs) that I am creating one of those bland, uncontroversial, unengaging blogs?
Virtual Roving Reference
I loved Brian Mathews’ ideas in “Intuitive Revelations”. He created a kind of virtual roving reference, but I was sorry that he didn’t describe in more detail how he actually did it. For instance, he said he followed bloggers who had selected Georgia Institute of Technology as their academic affiliation. Now, how did he do that? Is there a way to search blogs by affiliation? Another interesting idea would be to do this sort of thing on Twitter – where people are even more likely to express their frustrations with library services or resources. I know that you can search people’s bios on Twitter with TweepSearch and so it would be easy to follow all UWO students on Twitter. Take note, this might be a good idea for a final project in this class.
Case Studies
This is already getting too long, but I did want to comment on the case studies. I looked at the academic libraries because that’s where I want to work. I think we hope that the blogs produced by these libraries answer questions and spread information about key library resources or information literacy. But it seemed to me that The Virginia Commonwealth University blog contained mostly technical questions: about computers, the bathrooms, opening hours. Now, I’m sure this in not unlike the ratio of technical to meaty questions that come up at the reference desk, and it was clear that the blog also answered some meatier questions. I don’t mean to make it sound like we shouldn’t answer these technical questions – our users need that information, but how do we get to those people who have meatier questions but aren’t asking them?