Week 4 Thing #9

Looking for librarian blogs... I'm sure there are many very good blogs. I have read in the past some that are for special libraries that really work for their particular library. I tend to lean toward the people who are on the national leaders list like Doug Johnson, or Stephen Abram.
From Stephen's Lighthouse blog just listed these two links below to lists of things to do with Web 2.0... Kind of fits right in with this class...

July 21, 2008

50 Ways to use Social Media

Jeremiah Owyang has another good post:

50 Ways to use Social Media, listed by Objective

Another good list is from Chris Brogan:

50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing

It seems a shame that so many libraries don't engage in enough active listening to their markets of users. The annual (or worse every 5 year) survey just isn't enough anymore, if it ever was.

Next search-- I went to Suprglu and found Infomancy blog which led me to the Fish4Info site. Now this is interesting and I hope to get back to reading more about it. The Fish4Info uses DRupal (which I have heard of and that's it) and a quote from the page says:

What is Fish?

Fish4Info is a next generation library portal that seeks to make the library catalog a socially engaging destination by integrating web 2.0 technology with the catalog.
From book reviews, to forums, comments and tags; fish4info makes the library website an interactive social community.

Sounds great! I've been struggling for a year on what to do with my library page. So I'll have to look into this more!

Even after looking at many wonderful blogs I still love Will Richardson for providing inspiration, new ideas, and connections to lots of people doing and thinking about wonderful things in education.

Hmmm... I seem to have lost all that I wrote about by efforts at using the various blog search tools! I decided to try to look for blogs from people who were in China for the earthquake. I have some pictures from last summer when I was in Chengdu where the earthquake hit and I thought I could try to compare-- or at least have some first hand stories to go with talking about the

region and making connections to current events...

Well, my results were poor to say the least. Google returned the best results, but really nothing like I was looking for. I agree with Leslie that Technorati is annoying. I got a lot junk pages with advertising, or news articles.

It was a good thing to try and still a good idea I just need to practice more with other topics before I start teaching this to teachers and students. But what a perfect way to get first hand info on a topic. There are a lot of such blogs out of the middle east, so I had to wonder if this is part of China's control of the Internet.