thing 2: investigating other blogs

okay, so thing 2 is about other blogs. there are lots of excellent lis blogs out there and i'm going to talk about which ones i like and i might even try and explain why i like them too.

before cpd23

before i started doing this i didn't even have a google reader account. i had a fairly large folder of lis related bookmarks that i would check every now and again, but had never really considered using an rss reader. now i finally have one and i'm not sure how i ever lived without it! i'm really enjoying spending half an hour or so a day looking through different library related blogs. you can see a list of ones that i like over on the right somewhere, but i'll pick out my favourite couple and talk about them on here if that's alright with you?

obvious choices

so i've probably chosen the obvious blogs to subscribe to, haven't i? well, i'm still quite new to this, so if anyone happens to be reading this, please give me some recommendations please! okay, here's a list of blogs that i like and, most importantly, why i like them:

• the wikiman - i'd bookmarked ned potter's blog before, but since i've been involved with 23 things and have been looking on lisnpn, i've been reading it lots more. he always manages to stimulate interesting discussions in the comments sections of his posts too. he seems very approachable as well, so much so that i almost sent him an email the other day. i was going to ask for advice about a job application i was working on but i chickened out and decided not to bother him.
• self-plagiarism is style - a lecturer at university talked about dave pattern as if he was some kind of library god. i imagined that if they were writing something about him they would have capitalised the first letter of any possessive pronouns they used, such was their apparent reverence for his work. i wrote about him quite a lot for a couple of essays and his blog was always very useful. he's a systems librarian at huddersfield university, which means that he's about 100 times more intelligent than i'll ever be. i don't understand some of the techy stuff, but i do enjoy posts like this one.
• bethan's information professional blog - i've only recently started following bethan's blog, but i've looked back through the archives and found some really useful stuff. guides on how to do presentations and things like that. her posts are nicely written, too. not full of intimidating jargon like quite a few lis blogs (although obviously it's difficult to avoid it sometimes!).

i'm quite an ambitious person, i suppose, and reading relatively new professionals' blogs is inspirational, really. i want to achieve things! i want to be considered an expert in my field! hopefully by engaging more with the lis community, reflecting more on my own skills and knowledge and gaining experience of working in libraries, i might have a chance of doing all that. probably not though!

obviously there are loads of other excellent blogs that i haven't mentioned by name, but i'm sure you know about them already. if you'd like to leave me some suggestions for other blogs to subscribe to, please leave a comment underneath!

i didn't actually get around to commenting on anyone else's blogs. i don't feel confident enough or feel like i have anything of value to contribute at the moment, but i think my confidence is growing. maybe i'll pluck up the courage to say 'yeah, i agree!' or 'this is a very interesting post' under something this week. i'll keep you posted!

i might get to work early tomorrow so i can work on thing 3. hmmm. laters!