What I'm Going to Look for In a Blog

My friend Nichol is, shall we say, "technology challenged." She hates the computer and the Internet, so I usually end up trying to explain how sites work and what she should expect. A few weeks ago she discovered blogs and thus began my defense of the sometimes indefensible. She had been trying to find fast crockpot recipes for her family, and many of her search results were blogs. Her argument was that if you title your blog "fast crockpot recipes" or something similar, that's what you should expect to find. Instead, she found pages and pages of diary-like, personal stories, with nary a recipe to be found. I was speechless. She was right.

Too many times blogs are unfocused or downright unhelpful. As more libraries use blogs to reach patrons, it is important for them to use blogs effectively, or risk effectively alienating a tech-savvy part of their audience.

A good example of a nicely focused blog is "The Buzz" from the Madison-Jefferson County Public Library, in Madison, Indiana. One of the problems that I have, and that most librarians and libraries have, is they are interested in so many things! I want to tell you about my latest recipe, and what's going on in librarianship and how the baby is doing. The library wants to tell you about important new books, events, history, art--everything really. What the MJCPL "Buzz" blog does, though, is keep its focus. It's OK to have more than one blog. This one is only events sponsored by the library. Besides focus and clarity, "The Buzz" is also updated regularly and we know who posted the update and when. On the other hand, I'm trying to learn more about blogs so that my personal blog is better, and I see that "The Buzz" is making some of the same mistakes I do. I hope they fix it sooner than I probably will! Realtors go for location. Librarians go for metadata. These posts are simply listed most recently first. How do I find something older? What if I need information on all the lectures over the past year? Tagging these entries and then providing a search option, or a tag cloud would be a great way to make this blog more user-friendly. And Bill, who are you man? I want to know more about you! Link me to your bio, or info on your role at the library. (You'll notice I've added a little something-something about myself and also a nice old photo from when I was young and good lookin').

Then again, I do like some chaos. Probably my favorite library blog is this one from the Free Library of Philadelphia. These poor folks have been hit with budget problems to boggle the mind, but they keep trudging on. Sure, they cover pretty much everything, but hey! they tag, so it's easy to search by date or by tag, which makes it all good in my book. Besides all the stuff of "The Buzz" they've also got a nice little link to "About the Blog" which tells you why they blog, and who gets to blog. I've never even been to Philly but this is a regular read for me.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I'm off to start adding tags to my own entries!