Blogging/RSSing the Librarian Way - Part I

Today's session on blogging was interesting, but could have been more. Two of the billed speakers were present: Marie Kaddall, Information Professional Consultant for LexisNexis and Catherine Lavallee-Welch, Associate Librarian, University of Florida-Lakeland. Unfortunately Jenny Levine, "The Shifted Librarian", was a no-show, citing a family emergency earlier the week before. Despite her definitely being the main attraction, I was pleased to see people stay put for the session; indeed the room was jam-packed. I was fortunate to have a seat with lots of room, albeit on the floor at the front.

Tidbits from Marie Kaddall's talk: "Trends in Blogging and RSS"

Kaddall largely gave an overview of the state of blogging and a brief run-through of RSS use:

• From a perseus.com Blog Survey, 98% of bloggers are under 30; only 2% of working adults are blogging
  
• blogging is the democratization of the press
• blogs can be created for the "nanoaudience" such as family, co-workers, friends
• leading blog hosts are Blogspot (used by Blogger), Xanga, and LiveJournal

She talked about different types of blogs, and different types of people who are blogging. Aimed particularly at teenagers: AOL Red blogs and bolt.com.

Types of blogs I hadn't heard about yet:

• dashblogs and linkblogs: blogs that just point to info on the web or websites (what this blog would be if I wasn't also summarizing sessions and adding the little comments now and then!
• kLogs: knowledge management blogs (I'm not clear how this differs from the other blog types)
• Plogs: password protected project management blog (presumably used for individual projects)
• podcasting
• social podcasting: for example www.sparkcasting.com

other applications:

• Doppler, iPodder, iPodderX are all software for downloading podcasts
• Airtight is a taxonomy developed for tag browsing Flickr (Flickr being one of Yahoo's applications for storing and showing photos on the web)
• social bookmarking e.g. http://del.icio.us/ and http://www.blogmarks.net/
• bridge bloggers e.g. Global Voices from Harvard Law
• new blog search engines e.g. http://www.icerocket.com/
• Wikis, which she billed as "the wisdom of crowds" to tie in with another LexisNexis talk later at this conference - e.g. http://en.wikinews.org
  

Regarding RSS

This part of the talk seemed a little glossed over I thought. RSS was mentioned, as were feedreaders/aggregators. She mentioned that some browsers such as Mozilla and Foxfire incorporate feedreaders. She mentioned various other RSS applications, and I believe mentioned bloglines in particular as a favourite of many.