Obligatory blog day post complete with related ramblings

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.