Bloggeriffic...

Some interesting thoughts on blogging in the readings. I had no idea how blogging came to be nor, as many have mentioned, did I think it was happening as early as 1997! I remember just starting to hear about it 3 or 4 years ago and thought it was brand new! I sort of lament that I was unaware of blogging in its early days when it was a small community as opposed to the messy, tangled web it is now.

I liked Rebecca Blood's description of what she feels the process brings to the blogger...reflection, self-growth, discovery of a voice. My first reaction to this was that any process of daily writing would bring the same things, but I have never considered how identifying sites & articles that you deem to be important or of interest could also add to this self-reflection process...

I am a bit intimidated by all of the blogging options out there...Blogger was the only one I was familiar with so it is the one that I used for this blog. It was definitely very easy to set up and now I see that it is one of the most user-friendly as the readings tend to portray it as a sort of the "training wheels" version of a blog. I see a lot of you have used Wordpress...how was it to set up, etc? It seem as though Wordpress might be the best of all worlds: still free and quite user-friendly, but offering significantly more features.

Has anyone tried any other ones and can comment on their experience? Christy does a good job of extolling the virtues of LiveJournal in her post.

As far as selecting the right tool to use in creating a blog for a library, it would be important to be able to customize it so that you could brand it with the library logo and ensure that the user does not think that they have left the library site. I think the choice would vary depending on what the functions the library hopes to use. I would imagine that most would be less interested in networking features as these would be difficult to monitor for mis-use. Of the library blogs in the case studies, most seem to use the blogs largely as a bulletin board so additional features would perhaps be a consideration for the future. Perhaps reliability of the server, ease of use, and password protection would be most important in the beginning?