Thursday, May 13, 2004

Technotes

1. Not pleased with Blogger's new look. Oversimplified and over-tabbed in design and interface, with too strong an initial emphasis on sign-ups where it once spread content accessibly across the front page, this week's Blogger is much more oriented twards the as-yet-unafilliated newbie than the millions of us already hooked on phonics; I'll especially miss the "entry on top, post on bottom" interface that preceeded the overhaul.

If I didn't know better, I'd say the fine folks at Blogger assume the post-initiated will use the popup Blog This interface (now playing at a Google toolbar near you!). but what about those of us who see our blogging as a creative act, and might prefer to do so in an immersive writing environment? Blogger's either misread the majority of its audience, or I'm not in it.

2. Made this Kinja digest of library blogs today as a follow-up to yesterday's library/edtech department meeting demo of the potential of and for RSS aggregation in schools and libraries; let me know if you know of any good library blogs that aren't on the list. Thanks to Shifted Librarian Jenny for pushing the exemplary work of Moraine Valley Community College; it made a great starting point for my presentation.

Other new aggregation tools I'm liking right now: FeedSweep, feedroll, and of course del.icio.us, which aggregates individual bookmarks and, when used as a collective tool, becomes a bloggish and wiki-like linklist library of and for an entire community, neatly categorized by subject area. I sold the school webmaster on this stuff in a meeting yesterday (what if you could let people click off a box next to each sport that they wanted to follow, and every subsequent time they showed up at the school webpage the right sidebar would show them the most recent of their favorite teams' news and game results?), and the librarians seemed excited, too: already, one's caught the meme and started her own blog. Huh -- looks like blog aggregation and the rest of the social networking toolbox set really is the next big thing.

posted by boyhowdy | 9:05 PM |

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