Long time no write - here anyway. I had to write a lit review as an exercise, which took some time.
It appears library weblogs are not much written about. They are also difficult to find. Many of them don't allow comments, don't market themselves, are impossible to find from a library homepage, don't provide RSS feeds, etc etc. Not doing themselves many favours.
Having a bit of a break. Back soon.
It's a shame that Blogigo decided to 'spruce' things up. It makes this page slower to download for a start, which is annoying.
I've done a little survey of alternative blog hosting sites. For a long list see the following link (and Blogigo isn't mentioned):
I browsed some of the sites from there and chose some which looked pleasant enough to explore and allowed exploring of some blogs to look at features. Here they are in no particular order:
Blogster - Each blog has a profile at the top, which I would find annoying. It calls entries "articles".
Blogdrive - Some knowledge of HTML is required by the looks of it. Ability to put anything in the sidebar which appears to be on the left always. There is a help forum.
Deardiary - The examples I looked at looked more like web pages.
Blog.co.uk - Features trackback and tags!
Blogsource - fairly basic looking designs, sidebar on the right from examples I saw.
Cliqueblogs - Included icons on blogs for MSN and AOL to indicate if you were a member, etc.
Blogspirit - fairly basic
Ebloggy - Archives were just numbered pages which is next to useless. Able to put anything in sidebar it seems. Ironic that the first blog I looked at was one of Janey Godley's.
Easyjournal - I used to have a blog here before it, too, changed hands and got worse. Fairly basic with some nice designs, includes calendar, archives and 'networks' but no allowance for external links, it seems.
Blurty - another one I used to belong to - very like livejournal in appearance and structure. Obviously I didn't like it or I'd still be there.
Overall I have to say a lot of blog hosting sites offer very basic features. Most do not offer polls, external links and none of them had a counter (although you could add these to sidebars on some of them).
Blogigo may not be the same, but it's still pretty good compared to a lot of others. This has convinced me to stay.
Hope it's helped you out too.
Well, I'm supposed to be researching library weblogs, but the big problem is finding them. While there are lists of numerous library weblogs in USA there are very few if any in Australasia which is the region I'm specifically interested in. Library web pages don't seem to advertise the fact if they have weblogs or not - even when I know of one library that does - there is no link to it from the main page and it is nigh impossible to find. This will be a problem!
On another point, due to the rather unsatisfactory nature of the changes on this site, I have begun looking at other blog hosting sites to see if there is one that is user-friendly and has good features. I will report back on my findings in my next entry - stay tuned. For now though, I have more mundane things to do offline!
Mood: confused
What has happened to this site??? I can't view my blog and it demands Firefox browser (which luckily I have installed). Some warning of changes would have been appreciated!
I don't want to have to move from here to a more reliable site... But I may have to. Disappointing.
Busy reading literature so haven't had time to update.
I think the new owners of this site are making a bit of a mess of this place. What a pity. I always think 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it!'.
I'm supposed to be doing a literature review (not THE review for my actual thesis but just as an assignment) and have yet to feel satisfied with what I have. I've collected many articles on blogs but now that I'm to concentrate on library weblogs, I need more. So - more searching. I'm going to have to get down and summarise them all pretty soon though.
I really have found blogs useful for finding articles and information on weblogs. It's been brilliant. Weblogs concentrating on weblogs have gathered many useful links which I've followed happily but need to try to focus more. Naturally, while browsing, I come across some really interesting blogs which are not really useful for my purposes but have been handy to add to my Bloglines feeds. Yay for RSS!
