Week 2: Blogs

For Week Two of CHPLearning, we take on blogs. I have been blogging with Blogger since February 2003, when I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. I told scary tales of substitute teaching, logged library school adventures, and I share stories about my life and Richmond with far-flung friends. (Well, until I joined Facebook - that's my main stay-in-touch tool, now, and I use my personal blog mostly for longer stories.) I also have a LiveJournal account, and my best friend set up a WordPress blog for me, but I definitely like Blogger best. In the six years I have been using it, it has become more intuitive. I used to use a fair bit of html, but now it's all buttons and widgets. Still, I am glad for the tiny bit of html I learned in library school because it helps me tinker with blogs and other web 2.0y things.

This week's CHPLearning entry prodded me to visit Technocrati and Google's blog search. I knew about them, but hadn't had the need to use them. I can't quite picture a patron asking "how can I find a blog about such-and-such," but you never know.

Speaking of patrons, early in my CHPL career, a patron asked how he could share pictures of his old car with other car collectors and I helped him set up a blog. I thought it would be a great solution and coached him along. For a week or two, I checked back on that URL: he hadn't updated it. Did he forget his password? Was it the wrong solution for his need? I learned Flickr right after that, so I could help any future patrons with a need like that, but patrons never ask us for that level of support. Most folks need to learn how to attach a resume to an email or figure out how to do an online job application. Is it because people who want to blog will just play with it or ask their friend who blogs how to do it? Is it because library staff aren't perceived as knowledgeable about such "advanced" things? Let's keep it from being the latter!