j’s scratchpad

The five of us who are presenting and/or moderating the October 30th blog program at Mount Holyoke College met the other night to coordinate our talks. I’m even more excited about it all now. It’s not just an introductory talk, though I will begin the afternoon by trying to make sure everyone in the room at least knows what blogs and feeds are, some tools related to them, like search engines and aggregators, and some blogs they might find useful. Moderator Kris Liberman will warm the room with her charming smile and interest in blogs. Maybe we can convince her to share what she knows about knitting blogs. Garrett Eastman will talk about what he does with the Rowland Institute at Harvard Library Blog. Josh Ain will discuss how people are using blogs. Shimon Rura will give an introduction to Frassle, the blog platform he and Josh are developing, and show a number of features of blogs information professionals could find useful. Shimon gives more info about Josh’s and his portions of the presentation. We’ll highlight some nifty blogs and give plenty of examples of things people are doing with blogs along the way.

There will be lots of time for questions and discussion and we’re hoping for lots of audience participation. If anyone is afraid of forgetting a question, if there’s something anyone’d really like us to address, or if anyone’s too shy to speak in a room full of colleagues, feel free to post a comment here (anonymous comments are possible) or contact me.

The room we’re meeting in is rumored to have wireless Internet access.

If there are enough laptops and interest, we might be able to have a hands-on component where participants can begin their own blogs and/or actually play with some blog software.

Space is limited, but there’s still plenty of seats. If you plan to attend, register soon. Registrations no later than October 20th will help the program coordinators get an accurate count of attendees to the caterer for food.

Details

Addendum 10/21: The inspirational and amusing Josh posted about the talk.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 19th, 2004 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Professional Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.