Computers in Libraries -- Collaborative Blogging

Blake Carver, he of LISNews.com and someone of whom I've been a fan for many years, did the last track A session on Thursday about collaborative blogging.

Actually the presentation was more of an overview of how he got LISNews started and what he did with it. Which was fine; that was interesting enough in and of itself. He also looked at the idea of blogging in general; starting with his thoughts about what Michael Gorman said in Library Journal ( Library Journal Link ), and what he got right and what he got wrong.

(For more blogger perspective on Michael Gorman, but on your asbestos boxer shorts and search Feedster for "Michael Gorman" "Library Journal".)

From there he moved into what LISNews is, both technical (Slashcode!) and practical (librarian community, RSS feeds, etc.) I was amazed to learn that he's put up about 14,000 news stories over the last six years; pretty impressive.

If you run your own 'blog you won't be surprised that Blake considered the strengths and weaknesses of LISNews very similar: the openness of the system, the fast server, the fact that the HTML is mostly okay and supports most browsers. But the weaknesses don't seem to stop visitors and prevent a very healthy growth across time. At the moment Blake counts his community as about 4,000 librarians and interested/affiliated people.

Blake seems to have a good sense of his multiple hats as editor, programmer, author, sysadmin, etc. He did a great boneless-toddler-dance imitation of people sending him whiny e-mails. One role I noticed he did not mention is advocate; I'm not sure he realizes it but he has built a large and well-respected community of librarians and thereby has become a de facto advocate for online librarian communities (lucky for online librarian communities.)

The presentation concluded with a look at the future, which looks bright for Blake as he posts his 10,000th story, LISNews grows to over 15,000 stories and over 20,000 comments, and over 30 million hits. I'm amazed he can keep LISNews going like he does while working a full-time job -- that's some serious work!

I think next time I'd like to see more about the non-technical aspects of what he's doing -- how he got the volunteers, what he did initially to promote the site, what he does to keep the conversations on the site more useful than not, how he finds his stories (he touched on this briefly), how he sees the community changing in the future, and so on. Blake is an unusual combination of technical and editorial, and it seemed to me that he saw early that getting a lot of people on board would help his effort a lot. Sharing his perspective on that, and how others can do it successfully, would help a lot of folks.

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