So, every so often, I think about getting blogcards, especially those with gapingvoid comics. But the problem with that is that I might have to choose which one I’d like on the card. There are too many good ones. This one is now under my consideration:

"It’s all about thriving in markets that are smarter and faster than you are. It’s all about being utterly fucked if you don’t know what I’m talking about."

As is this one:

the future belongs to the geeks. nobody else wants it.

gapingvoid explores how financially supporting bloggers can change the blogger-reader relationship with a conversation snippet. That’s not to say people shouldn’t financially support bloggers. It’s a caution that bloggers and readers should be aware of how their relationship might change when money enters the picture.

Note: Some people might find the language in the cartoon a little crude for work.

Speaking of the Friday Five, The Redhead is back in the blogosphere with her new blog Very Well Red–a fabulous and quite fitting name.

I’ve missed you, Redhead. It’s been way too long.

Those of you who have been reading the scratchpad or blogging on Harvard’s server for two to three years might remember the now defunct global stats and rankings pages some of us used to watch. Many of us have been hoping we could find a similar ranking tool for our blogs or some other measure of stats, so I keep an eye out for such tools.

Bill Ives writes about Who Links to Me, a ranking site that gathers data from a few different sources. He found some inconsistencies. One possible inconsistency I noticed immediately is that it only claims 7 blog rolls list the scratchpad. Surely more than that include a link to this blog. When I technorati this blog, I can easily find six. I know of at least one more that isn’t there.

The Motley Fool, an entity known for financial wisdom, discusses Wal-Mart’s use of bloggers for public relations following some negative press about the practice and how some bloggers potentially and perhaps intentionally misled some of their readers by not disclosing they were blogging for the retail giant. The Fool’s article has some great links and a paragraph about using bloggers for marketing worth pondering:

"Wal-Mart’s strategy to repair its public image through the blogosphere has resoundingly backfired. News like this makes the company sound sneaky and underhanded, out to launch the equivalent of a corporate propaganda campaign, which of course fires up Wal-Mart’s detractors even more. Meanwhile, bloggers who don’t disclose their relationships with certain entities or individuals lose a heck of a lot of credibility, tarring the entire blogosphere by association, and making blogs seem that much less reliable as a source of information."

Anyone considering using blogs for marketing should be reading gapingvoid, especially cartoons like this one: "blogging requires passion and authority. Which leaves out most people."

Steven Cohen is working on a meme about 10-15 sources librarians read and encouraging us to post them in usable formats, like with OPML. He lists his recommendations, which, he notes, could change at any point in time.

I am surprised that I am only familiar with four of the ten sources he lists and even more surprised that one of them is the scratchpad. I feel so much pressure to write something intelligent now. ; )

What would my recommendations be? Picking ten or fifteen from the more than 100 sources on my subscription list is a challenge. I find that I don’t read everything every day, but instead, check in with some sources once a week or more periodically. There’s also a difference between what I read for pleasure and what I read for professional development. Of course, that’s all been on hold while waiting for my laptop repairs. If my aggregator is intact when I get the machine back, I think I’m going to end up testing its and my limits with the amount of unread stuff it might pull down from the last three weeks.

In no particular order, I might start catching up with this professional development reading first:

• ResourceShelf

• LISNews
• beSpacific
• gapingvoid
• Unshelved (who will be in Boston between March 22 and 24 for the Public Libraries Association conference!!!)
• Library Stuff
• Portals and KM
• the playful antiquarian
• RSS4Lib
• Garrett’s Rowland Institute at Harvard Library Blog
• Christina’s LIS Rant
• Shimonolog
• Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Steven names some tools to use to create OPML versions of reading lists. Maybe when my laptop returns, I can play with them.

Don’t forget I now have a public Bloglines account so you can read some of what I subscribe to. (Speaking of Bloglines, Amy tells me the scratchpad’s feed isn’t updating over there. Anyone else having new problems reading this feed? I can’t control my feed or how Bloglines reads it, so we might just have to be patient.)

Thanks, Rich, for pointing me to Steven’s post.

One of the concepts Cory Doctorow discussed during his recent presentation at Harvard is how developers often create products that lock users in so leaving is very difficult, if not impossible. At dim sum with the bloggers today, we talked a little bit about how it seems that blog platforms still don’t have easy ways to import and export content between systems. While the reasons for this seem obvious, it also has the downside of not making it easy for established bloggers to move to a different platform. Many of us don’t want to leave our data behind or be responsible for maintaining various sites with bits and pieces of our blogging identity all over the Web. Developers could be losing a number of customers because of their interest in locking customers in.

Over at Library Stuff, Steven writes about the importance of having contact information on blogs. As well as the need for people contacting us bloggers for networking, speaking engagements, and/or news interviews, there are also broken links, grammatical errors, typeos, “Hey, have you seen this? You should blog it.”, and more. I’m not ready to give my phone number to the world, though. I prefer to be contacted via e-mail here.

(Two of the problems with Manila complicating contacting us through our blogs is that we can’t change e-mail addresses in our profiles and even though bylines should point to the correct membership data, they often don’t.)

It’s probably no coincidence that this blog seems to get hit with comment spam near and during holidays. I stayed offline Monday as a treat to myself for President’s Day. Tuning in Tuesday morning, I find 30-something comment spams. Not a lot by any means, but enough to be annoying. I don’t want to have to worry about cleaning it off before I go to sleep. I got hit much harder with comment spam close to Christmas. Timing these incidents with holidays could just be coincidence, but it makes a lot of sense to me for these spammers to try to aim for times when people are likely to be away from their computers to add a bunch of bogus links to blogs through comment and trackback spam.

While deleting the comment spam, I’m finding piles and piles of trackback spam. It’s too bad Manila doesn’t have notification of trackbacks or some way to view only trackbacks like it does comments. Either one (or preferably both) options would give us some control over trackback spam on our blogs. Right now, we have no way to, well, track down trackbacks to figure out which ones are spam or not other than combing through the entire blog and clicking on every trackback link with one or more trackbacks. Tedious.