You Can Feed an RSS to Water but You Can't Make Him Think

I set up a Bloglines account perhaps a year ago, and have made much less use of it than I might have. Partly it's a matter of habit--forming the habit, that is, of checking my account regularly.

I suspect, with all the information out there--and is it a common librarian's tendency to be an information packrat, or is it just me?--wise use of RSS feeds includes being selective. It would be all too easy to end up with such an enormous wall of feeds that it would hurt your brain just to look at it. (Sort of like my approximately 33,000,000 Opera bookmarks before I fled screaming and started using del.ici.ous instead.) But I am thinking now that a very useful setup would include:

• Several of the blogs I'm interested in but forget to visit regularly.

• A couple of major news sites, especially sites such as the BBC whose content I'm not likely to encounter in the Tribune or on the radio.

• Some specialty sites that I really need to keep up with but often don't seem to find time to visit, such as Dewey RSS Feeds, the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA, and MARBI. 

Could RSS help me keep informed on what I need to know and filter out some of the stuff I don't need? Ya think?

Well, I'm going to try these ideas as I find time. And I might explore how I would go about setting up RSS feeds from The Cataloger's Burrow and the ever-nascent Flaming Catheads as well.

Your Embarrassing Dad on Facebook

"Your Embarrassing Dad" was going to be my Facebook name, reflecting my main purpose--along with learning up close and personal about social networking--for establishing an account. I didn't manage to do that, but I did manage, with Michelle's invaluable help, to join. But I can only find one of my kids! Where are the elusive J&J? (Though I don't know if the elder J even has a page.) How can I embarrass my kids if I can't find them?

On the positive side, I am now officially a Facebook fan of ITPLD.

More later, perhaps; I think exploring a site like Facebook is, for an old geezer like me (at the moment, looking at a group called "When I was your age, Pluto was a planet."), is in part a way of exploring a whole new, or at least unaccustomed, way of thinking about the world.

Blogging Miscellanea

A few more observations on bloggery before moving on to the next experiment:

I took a little stroll through Blogger Land last night (actually too long a stroll--it's kind of hypnotic) by clicking the Next Blog links on a series of blogs. It's an international and multilingual community. Of the blogs I sampled, most were in English, but two or three clearly not by native speakers. A few were in Spanish, a couple in Chinese, one or two in Portuguese, one in Swedish, one in what I think was Indonesian. I found blogs on travel, photography (amateur and professional), and ghost pictures, blogs for non-profit organizations, and a surprising number of family blogs--probably the biggest single category in this random sample. One couple devoted a whole blog to their baby daughter. Will this girl be saying the world's loudest "MO-OM!!" in a dozen years, or will she take it as a matter of course, one of a cohort of kids who grew up chronicled on the Web?

It also occurred to me that the existence of all these blogs, Facebook and MySpace profiles, and various other Web sites confers a kind of public anonymity that is similar in a way to what cities have always done. That is, your business may be out in public, but with so many other people in the same situation, nobody's necessarily interested in it! As a matter of fact, it can be difficult to find one of these personal blogs with a search engine even if you're specifically looking for it. Not that I don't still feel concerns about privacy.

Our set of blogs here at ITPLD creates a whole new wrinkle on anonymity. I know who some of my fellow ITPLD bloggers are and have an idea who one or two people might be. Others I really have no idea, but I know they are people I work with and see in the library often, maybe every day. It's kind of like a Halloween costume party--I know I know this person ... but who is it?

One more odd thing. Somehow, when adding a comment to someone's post last night, I accidentally discovered that Blogger provides an alternative to visual word recognition--auditory verification? Something like that, I don't remember exactly what Blogger calls it. You have a box to type numbers in, and a strange robot voice tells you to type in what you hear. Then you hear this weird soup of distorted voices saying a jumble of things that can't be made out, and about every 1 or 2 seconds a clearer, but disembodied and not-quite-human, voice is heard saying a number, which you type in. It works, but it's the kind of sound experience I'd expect from a movie like "The Ring." Just the creepiest thing I've heard in a long, long time. Brr.

Parnassus in Cyberspace

Over the past few days I've been reading a couple of Christopher Morley's early novels--Parnassus on Wheels (1915) and its sequel, The Haunted Bookshop  (1919). Very pleasant reading, and evocative of an older and slower-paced way of life--particularly the book-lover's life.

And yet, not without relevance to Library 2.0.

Parnassus on Wheels introduces us to Roger Mifflin, "the Professor," who is a secondhand bookseller of an unusual sort--his store is a horse-drawn caravan in which he lives as he travels around the Northeast selling books in small towns and on farms. The Professor has a philosophy about books--he believes they are a kind of medicine for the soul and the intellect, and that a book that is right for one person may be useless or worse for another. (Shades of Ranganathan's Second and Third Laws of Library Science: Every reader his book, Every book its reader.) He also believes that the people who need good books the most--and, he adds in The Haunted Bookshop, appreciate them best--are not well-off and well-educated urban types, but people with less formal learning, and especially people in farms and villages. Hence Parnassus on Wheels--the name of his rolling store, as well as the novel.

In other words: going where the users are--not waiting for them to come to us.