• Conservatives Try New Tack on Campuses – NYTimes.com
  (tags: education democracy capitalism traditionalists concervative nytimes)
• Technorati: State of the Blogosphere 2008 – Day 1: Who Are the Bloggers?
  Day one of 5 day report. Demographics of bloggers.
  (tags: bloggers blogging technorati)
• User-generated science : Web 2.0 tools are beginning to change the shape of scientific debate – From The Economist print edition
  (tags: peerreview stm publishing science2.0 blogging)
• Opening Up Education – The MIT Press
  TITLE – “Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge” Free e-book edition available.
  (tags: openknowledge, openingupeducation, mitpress, teaching, education)

First, sorry for the tardiness of this issue. While I was late, this duty has helped remind me of what I love about blogging. With my recent and sudden move to a new country and a new job, I have been ignoring the Blogosphere. Editing the Carnival reminds me not of the joys of sharing my own ideas, but instead of the value of the communities and conversations that arise out of this media. As a submission based publication, the Carnival embodies the best qualities of this community and encourages contributions from readers as well as bloggers. I would encourage my readers, whether you blog or not, to send your contributions in to the Carnival. Next week is at Libraryola. Submissions can be made directly to chris(at)libraryola(dot)com. All this being said, it also forced me to attend to my aggregator, and I found a few I really should post a response to. Now for the submissions.

I am saving the earliest submission for last because it may be just a wee bit controversial with the Carnival’s regular readers. We have a few submissions this week by Connie Crosby: Blog by a Canadian Law Librarian. The first submission by Connie is a book review with commentary on a title of particular interest to bibliobloggers, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Connie gives a thorough summary of a book that discusses the effects of Web 2.0. Definitely a submission which reflects back on the nature of Carnival. Connie follows this submission up with a discussion of the Toronto Wiki Tuesdays meetup. There they discussed the same book. I was especially interested in this post for two reasons. First, I moved to Toronto a few weeks ago and am looking for ways to “socially network” in a face-to-face environment. Second is a great list of 8 things Connie learned about wikis at the meeting. I would defintily check out that list and just might be at the next meeting.

The next submission is also self reflective. In her post, The Murky Waters of Participation & Politeness, Jennifer at “Life as I Know It”, reflects on David Lee King’s post Inviting Participation in Web 2.0 in light of Mark Lindner’s post A rant and some hopes for the Carnival of the Infosciences. I really liked this post because it helps me understand the feelings that editing the Carnival has aroused in me.

On a lighter note, Jason at “Thus Spoke the Pragmatic Librarian” discussed problems with search engine relevancy rankings by sharing and analyzing some of the interesting searches that brought people to his blog. His post makes me wonder if search might work better with a if it were powered by a more collaborative and human touch.

Next is a post by Karen G. Schneider for the ALA TechSource Blog. She tackles IT and Sympathy. While it is a longer post that covers many issues, I would like to highlight her “‘strategery’ for IT planning by non-IT departments.” The strategy is roughly the second half of the essay.

In the next submission, Joy Weese Moll of “Wanderings of a Library Student”, describes the design and marketing of a high speed instruction style, Lightning Learning. The post gives the background, but you might also want to check out the website of the project. Joy is adding updates of how the sessions are going.

Before mentioning the controversial post, I want to add a few of my selections. First I wanted to remind everyone of the many posts covering Midwinter. The Midwinter Wiki links to bloggers covering the conference. While there are many wonderful posts I want to point out tat least one. Along with other coverage, Jane of “Wandering Eyre” blogged OCLC’s Blog Salon (includes a great picture). I also read a great post about why someone didn’t attend, but can’t find it. If you know the one I am speaking of, please let me know.

I can’t put it off any longer. John Swift writes a post on “Who Needs Books?” I don’t really know how to respond to this one. I leave that to you.

CORRECTION: This is Carnival #63, you can find #53 here:

http://librarygarden.blogspot.com/2006/09/carnival-of-infoscience-53-at-long.html

Hi subscribers and visitors. I have been silent for a little while as I prepare to finish graduate school. I will soon be losing my university web space. Since I host some projects there that I want to keep up on the web, I figured it was as good a time as any to jump ship from Blogger.

I am now located at http://mchabib.com/, hosted on LISHost, and running WordPress with a K2 theme. I am much happier than I was on the Blogspot servers and Blogger platform. I am still working on this site, so please feel free to offer suggestions as to how I can improve it.

If you got this in your feedreader, then it means you are subscribed to my Feedburner feed, which I am keeping as my primary feed. My comment feed is also remaining the same. The blogger blog is going to remain in the same spot, so old links will remain valid. However, I am going to put a sign up notifying visitors of the new location.

Please stop by when you get a chance and let me know what you think.

Also, thank you for reading. I really appreciate the support.

, or, Robert and Maryam Scoble on “Ten Ways to a Killer Blog”

They began by pointing out that, as far as they can recall, this is the first time that they have given a talk on blogging together.

They set out with a simple goal, but the discussion oriented nature of the conference led to many interesting tangents. Below are my notes and thoughts on the talk.

1. Write from the heart – I missed the actual quote, but the idea is one we have all heard before. Write what you are passionate about.
2. “Read other blogs” – Robert points out that if you read blogs and don’t feel the impulse to write your own, then you probably shouldn’t be blogging. I can relate to this. Even though I read blogs on and off for a while before I began my own, there was always a little part of me that felt left out of the conversation.
3. “Pick a niche you can own (be different)” Maryam pointed out that Robert always says that there are two types of bloggers. One type has a desire to change things and is writing for an audience. Robert fits into that category. The second kind are those bloggers, like Maryam, who blog just for the sake of it. Either way, it is important to hit a unique market. Robert discusses the importance of branding your niche so that people begin to relate you and you niche.I have tried to do this with Academic Library 2.0. While I cover many related topics, I always come back to this one. As Robert was discussing this, I began to think of how social networking services increasingly need to focus on niche markets.
4. “Link to other blogs” (and comment). – When Maryam began her blog, she told Robert not to link to her because she wanted to earn her incoming links. Even so, Dave Winer linked to her blog on its first day and brought 3,000 unique visitors to her site. Don’t underestimate the power of linking. Also, don’t underestimate the power of link love. Robert points out that the internet rewards. They also stressed the importance of linking to material covering both sides of an issue because you automatically gain a level of authority above someone linking only to one side.
5. “Admit mistakes” – Maryam said that Robert has earned her respect on this one. Robert also mentioned the importance of keeping private data sacrosanct.
6. “Write good headlines” – Robert says that he moves items straight from his aggregator to his link-blog based on the headline alone. Similarly, he deletes most other posts coming through his aggregator because they have uninteresting or uninformative titles. Interesting to note, Robert said that he mostly subscribes to feeds for searches rather than individual blogs. I too have found ,myself doing this more and more. The eye tracking study that shows people look for keywords in headlines was mentioned. They point out that people love lists and are more likely to read posts with a list title. Jokingly they say that this is why they used a list for their presentation! Maryam points out that her most popular post is titled, “In Defense of Geeks or Ten Reasons Why You Should Date a Geek.
7. Use other media - Robert is convinced TechCrunch was discovered because Michael added a graphic to every post.The internet is a gift economy. I contributed my story about how I wanted to share my concept models. Instead of putting them on my blog, I put them on Flickr because I new there was a much better chance of someone discovering them. In fact, I had a pretty good idea that the more well known Library 2.0 bloggers would see it there. Michael Stephens did find it on Flickr and linked to the Flickr image. I lost some traffic to my blog, but I got my ideas out there, which was most important. My basic point was that social networking services can be a powerful way to share your work. Given that more people are subscribing to searches for tags, this is even more important. Ed Cone backed me up and said it was a really “powerful point.” Then Maryam threw a t-shirt at me because of the importance of my contribution. This was especially cool because many others had contributed, but I was the first to earn a t-shirt! Robert moved from this point straight to Second Life. As he was listing all of the things that you can put in Second Life, I, given the confidence from the t-shirt, yelled out “libraries”. He spoke a lot about what was covered in an article in The Economist a few weeks ago.
8. “Have a voice” – I think the saying they used was, “If you want to dig a goldmine, you need to use some dynamite.” Sometimes you have to take a stand for good. They discussed how Robert stood up against Steve Balmer surrounding Microsoft’s support, or lack there of, for a gay rights bill. He mentioned that he asked Maryam if it was okay to take the risk of getting fired. After she read over his post, she said it was okay. I really liked this story. It points out the importance of standing up for what you believe in, yet it also points out that sometimes you need to think of the consequences beyond what might happen to you.
9. “Get outside the blogosphere” – Go to events. Meet people. They then ran out of time and threw up their last few slides. They actually ended up having 15 suggestions.
10. “Market yourself”
11. “Write Well” – Spell check, check your state of mind.
12. “Expose Yourself”
13. “Help other people blog” – Don’t play hierarchy games.
14. “Engage with commenters”
15. “Keep your integrity”- Robert said it is important that “You are what you seem you are.”

I asked the last question of the session. I asked Robert if he had any advice on how one might pitch the idea of having a public blogger. The scenario I gave him was making the pitch at a job interview with a large company. He pointed out the importance of sharing original unscripted content. He also said it is important to point out (to the company) that they can’t control the world.

Given the tardiness of my coverage, a few people already have some excellent posts up about this talk. So if you want to learn read more about the Scobles’s talk, check out mistersugar’s take on BlogTogether or Daniel’s take on Xark.

Technorati tags: scoble robertscoble maryamscoble bloggingbloggingtips convergesouth convergesouth2006

Apparently it is blog day. For this exercise, I have chosen to share six blogs that I think my readers might find interesting. Given that the majority of my readers are librarians, the first few are more tech oriented blogs that might be off their radar.

• Unit Structures by Fred Stutzman — Regular readers might recognize this site as I have pointed to his posts numerous times. Fred, a PhD student here at UNC and a co-founder of claimid.com, focuses his research on identity and social networking. He has done some fascinating research on Facebook usage at UNC and has developed some valuable theories (Situational Relavance, The Network Effect Multiplier, etc.) concerning social networking. Anyone interested in how social software fits into the university life should check out Fred’s writings. One recent post of interest that I don’t believe I have yet pointed out is Orientation 2.0.
• FactoryCity by Chris Messina — Chris is an “Independent Open Source Ambassador at Large and co-founder of Citizen Agency.” I met Chris at BarCampRDU where I attended his sesson on social browsing. He is heavily involved in all things open. He is currently devoting a lot of time to microformats (highly relevant to libraries), BarCamps, which he helped start (the precursor to Library Camps), and a number of other projects. While his writings aren’t directly related to what we do, Chris is a prolific and experienced blogger who is working on some cool stuff.

They are both also involved in OpenID, which is something librarians should be looking at as it would provide our users with a single logon. We should be pressuring both our vendors and universities to look into this. To find out more about OpenID, check out the summary I wrote of Fred’s social software session and Chris’s social browsing session here.

The next few blogs I wish to share are related to educational technology:

• I only found I am Matthew Williams and You are Not last week, but it is already one of my favorite blogs. He is a writing instructor at the University of Minnesota who writes on a range of topics including collaborative learning and social software. His posts are frequent, long, insightful, and, not surprisingly, exceptionally well written. This blog truly is a gem and I highly reccommend checking it out.
• heyjude: Making fortunate discoveries – Web 2.0, Library 2.0, and more ¦ by Judy O’Connell – Judy is an experienced teacher, school librarian. I have found her blog to offer a great deal of practical advice into how to teach others about Web 2.0, Library 2.0, social software and more. She also offers a great deal of practical ways to use software for teaching. I often find that her writing helps me stay grounded and to see things from new perspectives. Pretty much everything she writes is related to the topics of my blog so I am not going to point out any specific posts. I encourage you to go explore.

Okay now for two library blogs:

• Life as I Know It by Jennifer Macaulay – Jennifer is both a student at Southern Connecticut State and a systems librarian. I have found her writings about her classwork to be quite valuable. She also points out lots of valuable biblioblogosphere stuff that I might otherwise miss. I also found out about blog day from her.
• The Library Rebooted: Unwrapped – Blog about Technologies Visited in MLC™s 2006/2007 Special Program Series: The Library Rebooted – This blog just went live a few days ago, and will feature contributions from participants, presenters, and other L2 voices. I am very excited to announce that I myself will be contributing some posts to the blog (thanks Evette!). The program and the blog both have a lot of potential and I look forward to watching them develop.