Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Review of Blogging and Rss: A Librarians Guide

Having had a 9 hour journey in all to read this, i've finally got an opportunity to review it as promised. I think the book is well researched and full of tips. But why? Well the author looks at How to use an RSS feeder like bloglines, how to write source code and how it works in the RSS feeders. Podcasts are also discussed, and how the source code works. The coverage on bloglines is really fantastic and I learnt so many things, even though I've been using it for over 8 months. That alone make's it worth a read.
There is also a large amount of screen grabs so one can visualise what Michael is discussing. These are not intrusive either.
Michael also interviews the following library blogs as well:-
Travels with the state librarian, librarystuff
, library web chic, Walt at Random, Lorcan Dempsey
, Librarian in Black, The shifted librarian, Library Techtonics, Walking Paper, Tame the Web, Jessamyn West. They give some great advice for why you should (and shouldn't) blog, and also what they have gained from the experience.
The opening chapters also deal with how to start a cheap and inexpensive blog and the different one's you could use. He predominantly discusses blogger
, but does discuss other blog software.
Michael concludes with some links that are worth having on an RSS feeder and a quote from the cluetrain manifesto and how to get blogging.
So are there any pitfalls? Well, at first the now defunct pubsub was discussed. Thankfully, at the end he left a post note saying he'd noted its demise. Finally, Michael did forget that one should always self subscribe your own blog to see if any one's reading it ;)
Overall, this book is for any librarian interested in learning about blogs, library 2.0 or want something technical to read. So really, all librarians should read it....10 out of 10

1 comment:

Michael Sauers said...

Yeah, the PubSub thing was discovered too late to take it out. At some point you're stuck with what you've written. Thanks for the great review.