Blog picking

The instructions for Thing 4 seemed innocent enough: read the blogs of other participant to the programme and report back. The difficulty of the task soon became evident at the number of blogs on display. Which ones to look ? My dubious solution was to pick a few catchy blog titles, combined with the pseudo-methodical approach of working my way up the list from the end of the alphabet.

I hadn't expected such diversity of displays and design, some minimalists, others very elaborate, others fun and quirky. Contents similarly varied. Some blogs adopted a straightforward and personal approach to the thing at hand: describing how they went about doing the thing in question, their own difficulties, what they liked or disliked about it. For other bloggers the thing was the pretext for a broader reflections on librarianship. I particularly liked the post of whisperintewilderness which took as a starting point her or his feeling of “information overload” when going through the myriad of 23 Things blogs. I also read with much interest the post by Magistra questioning the use of library rss feeds, and musing on what their contents should be.

As for interaction, I commented on a couple of blogs, with mixed feelings – I had nothing really interesting to add, but at the same time felt I should let the blogger know that I had found their posts interesting and thought-provoking. I also answered a doodle poll aiming to get age statistics about the participants.

It appears from the very handy netvibe list of 23 Things Cambridge blogs compiled by LK that most participants settled on blogger. I hesitated a little before adopting blogger. I had used it before and was a bit dissatisfied with the system of label – wordpress, which allows you to classify posts in broad categories, and further specify their contents with tags, appeals much more to my guilty need for classification.