Thoughts on blogs

Blogs are one of the web 2.0 things that I find most useful, both personally and professionally.   I think they are a great example of a tool that makes something that was previously hard really very easy (publishing on the web), and that can be used in so many ways for so many different purposes.   I have several blogs personally, the most useful of which is a travel blog which means I can share my experiences with friends and family while I'm away, and also then have a record for myself of what I did and saw.   I also used a blog to report on my trip to Chicago last July to attend the ALA conference, which was a really easy way to do this.   For the library, I set up a blog for the VHL back in November 2007, which I use to publish all our news.   It gives me several advantages over the way I used to publish news (manually updating a page on our website):

• Quick and easy to publish, and also to add pictures etc.
• RSS feeds, so that readers can subscribe directly.  And by using Feedburner the RSS feed is converted into an email subscription service too.
  
• RSS feeds also allow me to push the content to other places the VHL has an online presence, namely Facebook, Twitter, and back to our own website.  This means that one piece of news reaches multiple locations, and gives readers a choice of how they keep up-to-date.
• Another page to put information about the library and publicise things like saved links and new accessions.
• News is searchable, and also browsable by tags.
  

This is one way to make use of blogs in libraries, but the thing I love most about blogs is the wide variety of uses to which they can be put.   Blogs really embody the idea of web 2.0 as a tool, and are therefore potentially useful in so many different ways - straightforward news (like the VHL blog), archives of FAQs, guidance/tutorials, discussion of and links to resources, all sorts of things!