Just how far from the pack have you strayed?

Today I have been taking my turn at adding the blogs registered by participants to the sidebar of the 23 Things blog, and I've been having a good snoop along the way.   I am really impressed and encouraged to see so many people registering and starting out on the 23 Things 'journey' together (excuse the foray into Strictly Come Dancing-esque lingo there).   The enthusiasm with which this has been embraced is wonderful to see - especially having had more than a few fears that the whole thing would flop!   There seems to be a real buzz and excitement about learning something new and giving it a go, and a lot of pride in the achievements so far.   I also love that people seem to be finding it fun, and I'm particularly delighted to see the community feeling that is already developing.   This was one of the real hopes for the programme, that people would help each other along the way.   It's so heartening to see this in action, with people commenting on each others blog posts, and mentioning how they're working with colleagues or how they couldn't do something until a fellow 23er helped them out.   And even away from the blogs I'm getting a real feeling that this has given people something new and fun to talk about.   I think so far, we're achieving all the goals we set out for ourselves - getting people with all sorts of levels of technological knowledge to join in to whatever degree they feel comfortable with, getting people to overcome their fears that web 2.0 is somehow 'difficult', or their assumptions that it's pointless, getting people to share ideas and experiences, and getting a real variety of considered thoughts about both the positives and the negatives of all these web things.   One of the main things I am hoping to get out of the programme personally is to have my own opinions challenged by reading the variety of perspectives from all the web 2.0 'newbies' (and not-so-newbies in some cases) - I think there's often a danger that the librarians and web people who are 'in to' web 2.0 (myself included!) can be guilty of just talking to each other, and therefore getting assumptions reinforced rather than actually thinking afresh and coming up with new ideas.

I was quite nervous about this week, as it is one of 'mine', so there's also quite a hefty dose of relief to see the blogs set up and that the instructions were clearly OK.   I have learnt that my 'assume no knowledge' policy in writing them wasn't always quite assuming little enough for everyone - a few people not knowing about the Paint program for making screenshots when I'd assumed everyone did, for example.   But the aforementioned community spirit seems to have overcome any failings in my instructions for the most part, and I really hope this continues for the rest of the programme.   I'm really very excited now to follow along with the blogs and see how the rest of it unfolds - good luck everyone, and congratulations for all your achievements so far!

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!