Hello to anyone who might be reading this. I feel like I’m taking a chance moving away from the guaranteed audience I had at my LISNews Journal. I may well not have as many people reading me here as I did at my journal. Still, I feel like I need to strike out on my own. Partly because of functionality, partly because of content, and partly because of audience.
FUNCTIONALITY
There are some things I can do with a stand-alone blog that I can’t do well with my LISNews journal. Like blogging photographs. With a stand-alone blog, I can blog from within my Flickr account. I can see the pictures as I’m blogging them. With my current journal, I first have to go to Flickr, locate my picture, then go back to my journal and create an “img src” tag. Not so much bother, but enough that I haven’t blogged a lot of my Alaska photos on LISNews.
Another functional benefit will be having my blog’s name in newsfeeds instead of LISNews Journal. There may be other benefits that I’ll discover later.
CONTENT
While my friends at LISNews have been very understanding about my ecletic blogging interests, I’m still putting alot of non-library related stuff in a place mostly focused on library and information science. No one has ever complained about this aside from one or two comments when I was blogging politics way too much, but I think that I can use a place where there isn’t a field specific emphasis. This last point also leads nicely into the last area of concern.
AUDIENCE
I’d be willing to bet that virtually everyone who reads me at LISNews is involved with the library/information field in some way. I mean, if you weren’t, why would you visit LISNews? (Go anyway, it’s interesting!). So I’m a librarian talking to other librarians and information professionals. Which is great, but we librarians need to be talking to folks outside the field too. I’m doing that a little bit with my efforts in MySpace, but MySpace is filtered in a lot of places (including my workplace!) and pending legislation could block it in more places.
So I hope to expand the conversation space here, even though I’m running the risk of talking to myself.
WHAT WILL YOU FIND HERE?
So, now that I’ve gone to the trouble of establishing the Alaskan Librarian blog, what can you expect to find here? While I reserve the right to post on anything that comes to mind, here are the major themes I expect to cover:
- Everything about Alaska – Except for state politics. I work for a state agency and therefore leave opinions about state politics to the voters of Alaska.
- Information resources, especially government information. While I team-blog somewhere else about government information policy, actual information resources will be posted here.
- Photography, usually my own – I plan to take advantage of Flickr’s blogging capabilities to share a lot of photographs and other pictures here.
- Astronomy – There is alot of wonderful stuff happening above our heads.
- Book quotes and reviews – One part of the librarian stereotype I’m guilty of is reading a lot. Many times what I read interests me, so I’ll be sharing quotes from books. If I really like a book, I’ll write a brief review.
- Politics – I know the world doesn’t need one more political voice, but I hope to say something different than the mutual villification that passes for political debate in our country.
- Religion – I’m a Catholic Christian and while I don’t believe I have a right to force others to live the way that I do, my faith influences me and I’ll talk about that from time to time. I’ll also point out when our professedly Christian gov’t officials seem to diverge strongly from how I read the Gospels. Not too often, but sometimes I can’t restrain myself.
That seems to be enough themes for now. I hope you’ll find something in the next few weeks to interest you.
Filed under: housekeeping
