Friday, December 21, 2007

Progression

2007: The year I rediscovered the web

1. Discovered all the blogs about librarianship and information technology. (Before this I thought all blogs were about child rearing, dealing with a disease, adventurous sex lives, or politics.)
2. Learned how to use a feed reader. Became a big fan.
3. Subscribed to many LIS blogs and read them voraciously. Learned about the 2.0 stuff. Learned who all the "popular" bloggers were.
4. Started my own blog just for a test.
5. Coordinated a Learning 2.0 program at MPOW.
6. Put some pictures in Flickr.
7. Decided I wanted to start a "real" blog. Wrote a few posts.
8. Started twittering.
9. Couldn't figure out what I wanted to write about on my blog. Seemed like everyone else was already covering everything interesting, or if I got a good idea, I was too tired to write about it.
10. Started getting tired of reading all the feeds. Maybe I'll prune them down somewhat.

Current status at the end of 2007

I'm suffering from information and idea overload. The world got bigger, but it also got distracting. I need to focus on what I want to accomplish this next year and really try to direct my energies toward those goals.

On Blogging

I often feel like a sponge. I sit at my computer and soak up all the ideas, personalities, insights, issues, and I feel like I know a lot. However, distilling all of that into cogent paragraphs is more work. It takes time and energy. The old adage is that you don't really know something until you teach it to someone else. Teaching... writing... explaining... communicating. I have to learn how to squeeze the sponge. More than that, I have to be more than a sponge, because a sponge just spits out the same stuff that went in, unchanged. Useless, except for moving the stuff to a different spot.

I think the real key is what Walt Crawford titled his book on writing for the library profession: "First, have something to say."