Blogs and Blogging

Google Buzz, the Big G's newest and shiniest tool, launched last week to a huge amount of sturm und drang. What is Buzz? It's a lot of things, all shoved neatly into Gmail and leveraged with every ounce of power that Google could give it. If you've logged into your Gmail account in the last week, you've see a pop-up announcing Buzz, and asking if you were interested. Want to know what you're in for? Here's the very, very general idea.

Buzz is a combination of a few different existing ideas. The first is the concept of the "status update" or microblogging service, a la Twitter or Facebook. The second is the idea of conversation, as Buzz threads your discussions, instead of isolating replies like Twitter. This means that posts and replies are presented as a single thread, similar (very, very similar) to FriendFeed. Read More »

As the new guy on the TechSource blog, I'm obliged to introduce myself to the readership, in order to try and give everyone some idea of what to expect over the next year from me. Since I don't really know what ideas will float to the surface in the upcoming year, I think the best way to introduce myself is to show you what I've been involved in in the past.

I'm the Head of Library Information Technology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and have been at UTC for the last 3 years. My research interests include copyright, especially digital issues surrounding copyright law in the U.S.; open source software and its use in libraries; and how technology is changing the educational process in higher education. As you can tell, I tend to focus on technology in one way or another, and I expect that my columns here at Techsource probably will follow that general trend. Read More »

In the past few months, I have had the privilege to work with some amazing school librarians. Many of them want to begin incorporating more technology into their libraries, but are hampered by filters and lack of knowledge about the available tools on the Web. For some, even the most basic tools are blocked by overzealous IT and administrations. Read More »

If you haven't noticed, this blog is becoming overwhelmed by spam comments.  The blogging software we currently use allows us to ban spammers and delete spam comments, but only one at a time.  Deleting all these spam comments makes washing the windows on the Empire State Building seem like child's play.

In an effort to get the spam under control, we have decided to disable the comments function on this blog.  We really regret having to do this, because the non-spam comments often are very informative and insightful and lead to good conversation. 

Now that the spam-spigot has been temporarily turned off, we will try to catch-up on deleting the existing spam comments.    Read More »

Last month I shared some of the best practices for social software from my recently published ALA TechSource Library Technology Report, Web 2.0 and Libraries Part 2: Trends & Technologies. Commentor Linda Fox from the Capital Region BOCES School Library System had this to say:
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Greetings from my blogging hiatus while I finish my dissertation. Amidst statistics and coding data, I have librarian bloggers on the brain. So much so, I just wanted to post a quick shout-out to the ever-growing populace of the Biblioblogosphere and those who find inspiration there.
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I have blogs and bloggers on the brain. I'm constantly pondering the tools, the folks that write content for them, and where we might go next. The fact that the biblioblogger is the topic of my dissertation at the University of North Texas is probably the number one reason, and that's okay by me. Many folks said "write about and study something you love...it will be easier."

So into my blogger's POV in the last few days come some wonderful, fascinating and disturbing bits. For example:
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