I promised my next post would be on Wikipedia, which I reneged on to post about some hot blogs. Here, as promised, is a post about Wikipedia.
I love Wikipedia. I think most librarians love Wikipedia. It’s got a zillion different articles on a zillion different things. Because it is online and freely updated, it will have a complete listing of all of Donald Trump’s children before a print encyclopedia. Editors of Wikipedia post wonderful photographs and pictures all over the site so most articles have a picture to go with them. Some of the articles go into lots of details and they are hyperlinked to one another so it’s easy to click from one article to another related article. Much easier than flipping pages for sure. Wikipedia is a wonderful source and I have a few words of wisdom for users.
Things Wikipedia is great for:
Fair-use pictures and photographs. The editors of Wikipeadia are pretty diligent about making sure all the images are “fair-use.” That means you can use them without some artist hunting you down for royaly money. The images have explanations of why Wikipedia thinks it is fair-use.
Quick reference, especially of fast-changing events.
Things Wikipedia is not so great for:
Specialized articles and reference. For example, if you are writing a school paper on dancing and religion, the Encyclopedia of Religion on the second floor of the Main Library is a better option.
Reference for papers and school projects. MOST of the time, Wikipedia is correct. You will occasionally get an article when it has been hit by a prankster (my personal favorite was finding an article on World War II that had been edited to make it politically correct, i.e. calling the nuclear bomb “Obese Gentleman” instead of “Fat Boy”). To be safe, and to make your teacher happy, double check your information in a print encyclopedia. If you don’t want to come to the library and use one of ours, call the reference desk (560-0110) and ask how to get access to encyclopedias from home through NCLive and Credo.
I hope this helps as you use Wikipedia. Remember, it’s always good to have more than one source for factual information. Mistakes and typos do happen. — Jennifer
The website Blogtrepreneur has posted a list of 100 must read blogs by women. It’s a fun list with everything from politics, fashion, romance novels, food excersize, and more. Some of my personal favorite blogs are on that list including The Pioneer Woman (a woman from LA marries a rancher in Texas and blogs about her life with FABULOUS pictures); Smart Bitches. Trashy Books (Candy and Sarah blog about romance novels, sexism, feminism, and more–be warned, it’s a bit racy) and Go Fug Yourself (Heather and Jessica believe celebrities have no excuse to be poorly dressed).
If you’ve read the posts on blogs and RSS aggregators, perhaps you are now wondering what the difference between a blog and a wiki is. Hopefully, this blog post will help you out.
A blog is like a diary or a journal. It’s updates on a regular basis (or not so regular basis) and each update gets its own entry, but the older content doesn’t change. Imagine a journal/diary hosted online and you’ve got the idea.
For a wiki, imagine a document being edited by more than one person. Each time someone edits the document, the document changes. The old content is gone and replaced by the new content.
For example, I’m writing a recipe for macaroni and cheese. I’ve posted it online in wiki. You see my recipe and think What kind of crazy person puts canned tomatoes in her mac & cheese?! She must be from outer space. Disgusted, you edit the recipe and remove the canned tomatoes. You add in broccoli and ham, which is how your mother always made mac & cheese. Now the recipe online is yours with the ham and broccoli. My friend Sarah sees the new mac & cheese recipe and wonders about your sanity for including broccoli and ham. According to Sarah, everyone knows that mac & cheese should be made with hot dogs and you should put Saltine cracker crumbs on top. She edits the recipe and now her recipe with hot dogs and crackers is online. Canned tomatoes are gone. Broccoli and ham are gone. It is like those versions never existed and Sarah’s is the only recipe there. Bill is a bit of a food snob. He sees the recipe and appalled at the hot dogs. And the cheddar cheese. Bill makes his mac & cheese with goat cheese and thyme. He edits the recipe and now his is the official version. Carol is a prankster. She replaces Bill’s recipe with a mac & cheese recipe involving cat pee and oreos. Carol’s is now official until I look back at my recipe and think yuck and return it to the version with tomatoes and cheddar cheese.
This is essential how Wikipedia or any other wiki works. You can see the disadvantages in the example above, but there are some big advantages too. A mistake in the World Book Encyclopedia won’t be fixed until the next edition is out. A mistake on Wikipedia is fixed as soon as a person who recognizes the mistake can fix it. Perhaps an expert on Marie Antoinette’s fashion wrote the Maria Antoinette article. When an expert on the politics of the French Revolution happens upons the article, that expert doesn’t delete the old information, but fleshes it out with their expertise. As this happens repeatedly, you can get a really well rounded article on Maria Antoinette. Or you can get Carol the prankster with her cat pee and Oreos article.
Again, I’m going to rely on the lovely folks at Common Craft for a video.
Wikis can be set up so that only invited guests can edit the content or open so that anyone can edit the content. They are a wonderful way to include ideas and information from a wide variety of people and keep all the information in one centralized location. Durham County Library uses a wiki to keep track of our strategic plan. While we were developing the strategic plan, we used the wiki a place to hold all the wonderful ideas staff and the public had about making Durham County Library better. Now, the wiki is used to keep track of our progress. All the strategic planning goals and objectives are on the wiki, along with the names of staff members responsible for making sure the plan gets done and not just ignored. Everyone in the world can see our progress (you can too–check outwww.dclstrategicplan.pbwiki.com). The wiki allows Durham County Library to be transparent and open with its governance, which is always nice in governmental agencies.
There are downsides to a wiki–mostly pranksters. If your wiki is completly open, you open yourself up to the widest possible cache of ideas. You also open yourself up to the pranksters who put false, obnoxious, or otherwise unwanted and irrelevent information on your wiki. I’ll talk a little more about this in my next posting, which will be on Wikipedia specifically.
In the meantime, try out some wikis. Go to Wikipedia.org or check out Durham County Library’s wiki. Rochester, New York has a great wiki with information on what’s happening in Rochester at Rocwiki. And, if you like romance novels, a romance wiki is in development. These different wikis will give you a sense of what a wiki can do and when they are useful.
In an earlier post on learning more about Google, Jill briefly mentioned RSS feeds/aggregators. RSS feeds are great and you should look into them, especially if you like to read your news online or you check a bunch of different blogs. Hopefully this post will explain what RSS feeds and aggregators are, why they are AWESOME, and how you can get one. For the visually inclined, I’ve included a wonderful video from the creative folks at Common Craft.
Before you get an RSS Aggregator:
You probably check your blogs dailyto see if something new has been posted. Maybe you read the New York Times daily, also to see if there is news. If you regularly read five blogs and one newspaper, you only have to remember to check six websites daily. That’s no soo bad. If you read twenty blogs and three papers online, then you have to check twenty-three website daily. That’s getting to be a little tedious.
Deciding to get an RSS aggregator:
Imagine if you could subscribe to those blogs and online papers, like you do to the Herald-Sun or News & Observer or you favorite magazine. The new edition shows up in your mailbox without you having to ask for it.
An RSS aggregator does the same thing, but with websites like The New York Times and blogs.
After you get an RSS aggregator:
Blissfully you sit down at your computer in the morning. You sign into your bloglines.com account and skim through the excerpts of your favorite blogs and the headlines from The Washington Post. You click on the new articles and posts that interest, easily ignoring the ones that don’t. You’ve just saved ten minutes by not having to check those blogs with no new articles. Life on the ‘net reading blogs is perfect.
To see this visually, watch this video from Common Craft.
Where you get RSS aggregators:
There are a number of providers of RSS aggregators. Web-based email providers like Google have their own aggregators. Poke around your email to find it and remember you don’t always have to have an email account with someone to use their aggregator (Google allows you to use GoogleReader without a gmail account). Another popular aggregator is bloglines.
Browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox are also providing add-ons that act as aggregators. Firefox has a neat one that runs the new blog or news posts like a newsfeed at the bottom or the top of the browser. I think it’s neat, but it could easily annoy another person so check out different aggregators to see what you like. Remember, bloglines and GoogleReader will be accessible from anywhere with a web connection. If your aggregator is your browser window, it will only work on your home computer.
If you’ve been reading this and other blogs and thought “I want my own blog” or “I could blog better than those librarians,” now is your chance and I’ll tell you how.
Getting your own blog is really, really easy. Companies like WordPress (who the Library blogs with) and Blogger (a part of Google) make signing up for a blog as easy as signing up for a free email account.
The steps are:
1) Decide what you are going to blog about. Food and cooking? Your family? Your pets? Your life? Gardening? Cars? The possibilities are endless, but it’s generally easier to keep up a blog with a theme, rather than just random thoughts.
2) Sign up for an account through WordPress, Blogger, or another free blogging site (www.livejournal.com, www.thoughts.com, and clearblogs.com are just a few of the others). Blogger and WordPress are the biggies, but you don’t have to pick them just because they are big. Check out some of the blogs each service hosts and see if you like the way those blogs look. You can also read over the different features the services offer to see which you think you like better.
For your account you will need:
A user name
A password
An email address
A blog name
What you would like the web address of your blog to be (this can be the same as your blog name). Your blog’s website will have the host’s name in it. For example: something.wordpress.com or something.blogger.com.
3) Pick a template. While many popular blogs have a personalized design done by either the blogger or a paid programmer, blog hosting websites offer many different templates for you to chose from. The template will affect the color and look of your blog.
4) Blog.
Step 4 is the hardest part. Your friends and family will never read your blog if you don’t regularly post and you will never gain more readership if you don’t have regular posts. I was never good at keeping a diary or a journal (though I try with every New Year’s resolution), so I have to stick sticky notes around my computer to remind me to blog and it still doesn’t aways work.
Blogging is fun and a good way to keep in touch with friends and family. Many folks I know started a blog when they had a baby as a way to let their friends and family know. They could restrict viewers of their blog to their friends, update the blog with pictures, first words, etc. Remember, if you don’t restrict who can visit your blog, ANYONE can see it. Before you post your secrets, think of who can see them.
In my last post on Web 2.0 technologies, I posted about some different blogs. Some of them are ones I read and enjoy regularly, others are just suggestions to give you an idea of the variety of blogs available. I posted only ten blogs out of the hundreds of thousands blogs out there.
So, where do you find blogs you are interested in?
Here are blog directories where you can search for blogs by topic. Some examples (there are more, this is not inclusive):
My favorite way to find new blog is to look at the blogs linked on blogs I already like. Most of the time I don’t find them interesting, but occasionally it’s a hit. You can also Google “subject X” and “blog” to find blogs in a subject that interests you. For example, if you Google “motorcycle blog,” the first page includes:
Now you know what a blog is (don’t know?–read the “What is a Blog” post), let’s find some blogs to read. Of course, my favorite blogs are related to subjects I like (cooking, knitting, reading, and green design), but there are a ton out there on anything you can think of. Here are some suggestions:
Chocolate & Zucchini: Clotilde Dusoulier lives in Paris and writes about food (recipes, experiments, and general thoughts). She writes very well, her recipes are always interesting (even if it is something you may not cook yourself) and I find her willingness to experiment inspiring for my own kitchen.
Dear Author: Six readers write reviews, commentary, and thoughts. They write mostly about romance and fantasy. Their reviews are written as a letter to the author and they have a nice community of readers commenting on their posts.
Cute Overload: The perfect respite for a bad day–pictures of cute animals.
Endangered Durham: A local Durhamite, G.K. writes about land use, sustainability, and development in Durham. He has lots of pictures (historical and current) and is very opinionated. It’s an interesting blog to read.
Confessions of a Pioneer Woman: Ree lived and worked in glamorous LA. Then she married a rancher in Texas and her life changed. She writes about her life as a ranching wife, her children, Texas, and posts beautiful pictures.
Leave Me Alone, I’m Digging: This is a gardening blog from Greensboro, North Carolina. He has product reviews, pictures of his gardens, and general thoughts.
The Other Ebert: Our Audio-Visual Librarian has his own blog with movie reviews. Chuck has a wry sense of humor and broad tastes. Of course, you can always ask his opinion in person.
What’s Up @ Your Library: Check out our library full of information for teens–interesting links, new books, and more.
Up next from me:
Is there a blog directory?
I’ve got twenty blogs I like to read, how do I keep track of them (aka–what is an RSS feed)?
Did you know that you can ask us questions and tell us what you think on this blog? We would love to hear from you! At the bottom of each blog entry is a link which either reads No Comments or it will give the number of comments to the post. Click on this link to go to the Leave a Comment box. You can also click on the title of the blog entry to go to the Leave a Comment box. You do not need to enter your name or give your website if you do not want to. You must enter an email address; your email address will not be displayed to the public. Type your question or tell us what you think and click on Submit Comment. Your comment will display in a little while, and we will give you a reply. – Kathy
Jennifer’s last post about blogs comes just in time for the Durham County Library staff training about Web 2.0. This Friday and next the 2nd and 9th of May our staff will be participating in Web 2.0 training. Topics to be covered will include social bookmarking, social networking, blogs, RSS, wikis, Flickr, podcasting, and YouTube.
We are offering the training four times in those two days so we can get all of your Durham County Library staff up-to-speed on the latest technologies.
Staff training at the DCL is a large part of our Strategic Plan – “Saying ‘Yes’ to the Community: Durham Builds a Customer-Centered Library.” To see more about our plan, check out our wiki - http://dclstrategicplan.pbwiki.com/
Please feel free to comment on the wiki or here on our blog. — Jill
Asking “what is a blog” on a blog seems a bit circular, but I’m going to do it anyway. If you’re reading this, you may already know what a blog is. Or you may have just stumbled upon this blog on the Durham County Library’s website. If you are the latter (or a curious member of the former), please read on.
Blog–a definition:
On tax day, 2008, Wikipedia defined a blog as ‘(an abridgment of the term web log) “a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. ‘Blog’ can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.”‘ Most blogs have a specific theme, ranging from a diary-ish record of their lives, to politics, to books, etc.
What does this really mean? Let’s use the Durham Library Tech Blog as an example. The blog is maintained by an organization, acting as an individual. We update this blog at least once a week with new material, occasionally more. The most recent entries are at the top. Our blog is themed around technology–explanations of web 2.0 technologies, hints about using the library website and catalog, and getting the most out of your PC.
What do you do with a blog? The first thing you can do with a blog is to read one. If you are feeling ambitious, you can also comment on the blog and engage in a dialog with the author and the other readers. Mostly, blogs are fun to read. The ones I like have beautiful pictures, tasty recipes, and good reviews of books. My husband reads blogs about sports and I know people who read blogs about technology, politics, and cats. If you can think it up, if you are interested in it, someone has a blog on it.
I’ll post some examples of blogs in a later entry. Please leave your questions and comments!
