One more Thing (5)!

One of the things I wanted to get out of doing this series of Things was to be motivated to write on my other blog more often - so far that seems to be working!  I'm aiming for about once a week, and doing the Things and thinking about blogging and Twitter and such has been prompting me to write about other interests.

Thing 5

Take the weekend off?  Nope, I drew the Easter slot in the reference librarian rotation this year.  We were surprisingly busy, with actual research-related questions and not just, "Do you have a pen I can borrow?"

Feedback first so it's easy to find:

1. The "in plain English" videos are great!
2. It feels like there should be a more cohesive place for discussion for a program like this than in comments on blogs, but then I wonder if that wouldn't just end up being another "Thing" for people to learn.  (A forum, or a chat room, or some other group communication tool.)  Blogs can work for group communication, but it can be more cumbersome than some other media if not everyone is posting on the same one's comments.

And a summary of what I've learned (and/or observations) thus far:

Continued blog observations (and another .opml)

I read a handful of heavily commented blogs regularly, and I also moderate an online forum, so I've been noticing how the different blog platforms handle comment threading.

Comment systems that allow replies to replies, threading the conversation, really help to foster discussion, since it's easy to tell who is talking to whom. With out the reply-to-comment, it can be more difficult to unravel the threads of the conversation. Thus far Blogger doesn't seem to do comment threading; WordPress does.

Seeing how different people name, design, and use their blogs for a shared purpose is fascinating! Which tools people choose, how they use them, and how they envision the relationships between themselves, their blogs, and the central purpose (the workshop) are all very interesting to me.

A large number of us are using Blogger, but WordPress is a significant minority (compared to a paltry number of Posterous and Edublogs users). A large number of us are using post on the left/menus on the right layouts, with a handful putting the menu-type items (archives, 'about me' sections, etc.) on the left or trying out the three-column options. I wonder if there's a correlation with something (like right-handed/left-handed), or if it's just because that's the layout most of the default templates suggest first.

Given how interesting all those things are to me, you'd think I would be better at filling out conference evaluations. *sigh*

And last but certainly not least: the .opml file for all the blogs added to the spreadsheet since I last looked at it. If I've missed any, please let me know! This is just the new ones, so you shouldn't have to worry about it accidentally importing duplicate feeds.

Tweaking

I like to rearrange furniture. That's not really feasible in my office (limited outlets), so I tend to rearrange websites (blogs, forums, etc.) I administrate when I get to feeling like something needs to be moved around.

I didn't do a ton of set-up on this blog yesterday - picked a template that I could live with, and such - so I started fiddling around with the gadgets today. One of the things I decided to add and keep (so far) is the RSS feed for the other blog I write under this log-in. (Three posts in the past six weeks... hopefully I can get it moving more.)

One of the things I went through setting up but didn't keep was a list of links to all the other currently registered blogs for this program. It was great to set up because it meant I went and read what everyone else has written so far, but it occurred to me that, if all 150 participants register, it will be way too long and scrolly.

Past experience says scrolly is bad; people don't like to have to scroll all the way down to the bottom to get to something, the same way that above the fold/below the fold matters in print newspapers. I find the scrolly problem to be true for a lot of news sites that I read; they tend to put the newest stories at the top for that reason. If I have to scroll too far from the top of the page, I don't really bother to go all the way down to see what's there.

Of course, this conflicts pretty directly with my tendencies towards verbosity. I've found that 3-to-5-page-paper is a length pretty well ingrained in me from all those assignments in high school and my undergrad. Three to five pages doesn't really sound long (double-spaced, right?) until you realize your medium isn't 8 1/2" by 11" paper, but a probably 5" column down a screen. Scrolly.

The Blogs in Plain English video has me thinking about my high school journalism class: the funnel shape for stories, putting the most important information towards the beginning, and the later paragraphs are all details the loss of which won't make the story unintelligible if they have to be cropped for space. I was never good at that, probably because I've also never been good at drafting; most of my writing is my train of thought in action, and I never learned to think in a journalistic style. Given the whole problem of scrolly, the journalism concepts are probably good to keep in mind: how many people actually read to the end of a long post?

Perhaps this is why, in my high school journalism class, I was the copy editor. I proofread, cropped, and assembled, but I didn't write a lot of content. We didn't have journalism software in my class: the school paper was all assembled on large sheets with a wax gun. If there was something last-minute to go in, I had to pull apart the sheets, rearrange, and make it fit, occasionally slicing off a paragraph here or there to make it work. I like to tweak, to rearrange, and although the list of links was pulled because it would be scrolly, I'm sure I'll find another gadget to fiddle with here before the course of Things is done.