Value in the online world

Love for sale

Edublog Award Nominations
In this post I’m just registering my nominations for the 2009 Edublog Awards. My Nominations for The 2009 Edublog Awards are: Best New Blog – In the Library with the Lead Pipe (just over 1 year old; hope that counts as new!) Best resource sharing blog – The Distant Librarian Best librarian / library blog – The Distant Librarian Best elearning / corporate education blog – The Bamboo Project

This is not my blogosphere
One of the things I always loved most about social media was the transparency it created. If a product, service, hotel, etc. was terrible, you could be sure that you’d hear about it from plenty of bloggers. On the other side of things, small companies and talented individuals were able to get noticed because of word-of-mouth marketing online. It used to be so easy to get really honest, unfiltered views of products, services, etc. on the web as people were writing reviews because they felt strongly about the product. Now the water has been muddied by PR folks and the people who feed at their swag-giving teat. Some people are writing reviews of things not because they bought a produc

Constructive criticism
Let this be a lesson to you — never write a comment on a blog post while you have a baby on your lap who is simultaneously grabbing at your laptop and spitting up on your pants (yes, this really happened, I have the stained jeans to prove it). Trust me, what you write will never come out the way you wanted it to. I commented on a friend’s blog post about the Library 101 project and what I wrote came out really badly. So I hope to clear it up here, though while I may be more clear in my explanation, I may make an even bigger hash of things. Seriously, I should probably stop contributing to the web entirely until Reed is in ki

Shades of gray
Ever since the news of LibLime’s enterprise version of Koha and whether or not their actions consisted a fork of the code, I’ve been thinking about how black and white some of us (me included, at times) tend to see library products and library vendors. Stephen Abram’s “position paper” on open source ILSes got me thinking about it again. I’ve found it interesting how some vendors are vilified (sometimes fairly, sometimes not) while others get a free pass — to the point where we no longer even think of them as

Who should teach library instruction?
Don’t worry, Walt, I won’t apologize for being away and I won’t promise that I’m going to post more often (though I have a lot of ideas for posts, something has been preventing me from getting them out of my head and onto the screen). Wayne Bivens-Tatum recently wrote a very interesting post questioning who should be teaching library instruction — librarians or faculty. This is an issue that I’ve been thi