Personal BloggingKevin Smith - the Fiddling Librarian

Assistant Director, Cass District Library

Violist, Prometheus String Quartet

Husband and father of two

Who Blogs? Librarians Teenagers Journalists Parents College Students Everyone

Why do I blog? Stay in touch with friends and family Keep me up to date Organize my thoughts Practice Web skills Cheaper than therapy

History of the Fiddling Librarian Started on Blogger.com in 2003 Moved to Weblogs.us in March 2004 March 2005 moved to WordPress

What are some features of blogs? Title and statement of purpose Time and date stamp Comments RSS feed

RSS Aggregators Bloglines - web-based, free Windows based

http://www.sharpreader.net/ http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/

Mac OS Xhttp://ranchero.com/netnewswire/

Linuxhttp://www.nongnu.org/straw/

Where can I go to blog? Blogger

Good for beginners Easy to use Free hosting

Movable Type More feature rich Not free Requires PHP and

MYSQL

TypePad Easier to use version of

Movable Type Requires a subscription

WordPress Similar to Movable

Type Free software Requires PHP and

MYSQL

What should I blog? What interests you What might be interesting to your audience

Things of professional interest Politics and current events Hobbies & lifestyle Family

Photos

Photo Blogs Flickr

20 MB monthly upload limit 3 photosets Photostream views limited to the 200 most

recent images Storage of smaller (resized) images Friends and family can leave comments Photo posts can be “blogged” to other blogs

When should I blog? People who blog often are read more

frequently and People who write interesting blogs are also

read frequently Maintaining a balance between these two

elements is challenging

Blogging Etiquette Be careful Don't write anything that you don't want read

by everyone Don't get Dooced!

Finding Blogs http://technorati.com/ http://blogsearch.google.com/ http://www.feedster.com/ Blogrools

Questions?