I almost let it go by! Two days ago, Librarienne turned one year old. Oh, what a stormy year it has been. My head is a spinning cloud of many different thoughts right now so I’ll just pull a few out of the air and paint this post with random colors (how’s that for mixing metaphors!):
- As of this moment I have at least 5 posts in draft status … the oldest one was a comparison of Google Books vs. Google Scholars, another one looked at the paradox of librarians protecting patron confidentiality when so many people are so blatantly public these days, and the most recent post to go on draft status was a look at some movies we watched over Spring Break and which all seemed eerily related somehow (Sherrybaby, Lady Vengeance, Possession, Match Point).
- I wish I had made a screen shot of all the looks/skins/appearances I put my blog through in the past year. I must have tried a dozen different WordPress themes at one time or another with different widgets and what-nots. It would be nice to look back through them and remember what I liked or didn’t like about each one. For those of you reading this on an aggregator, I recently added a widget to my sidebar for my Google Reader shared items. That little box is *way* more active than this blog, I’m sorry to say, but it’s also a good place to see what I probably wish I had time to blog about.
- Which reminds me… I’m toying with an idea for a little class research project, but I’m not sure how well it would work so let me know what all you bloggers think of this. I’d like to find a lot of different blogs that feature a link or widget to the blog writer’s Google Reader shared items list and compare the number of items they share to the number/frequency of posts they write. Long ago in another land I had read something about the large number of content readers vs. the comparatively small number of content creators. I’m wondering if the amount of stuff we, as content creators read, affects the amount of our output. Of course it does, but how? I’m not sure exactly how to measure that. Number of links or citations per post? Number of shared items against words per post? At first I thought it might be better to look at Bloglines lists instead to know how many feeds blog writers subscribe to, but – with myself as a great example – I know that subscribing does not necessarily equal reading. The idea is still in its infancy.
- I’ve recently subscribed to a blog that is completely out of place in my blog reader – it’s not techie, not about libraries, not news … it’s about … (wincing in embarrassment) romantic comedies. Well, it’s from a guy who edits and writes screenplays for these bizarre little tokens of pop culture. And I, for one, think his blog posts are really fun and witty reads. He includes so many “what were they thinking??” quips when he discusses the latest script he had to suffer through, but he doesn’t go completely cynical, which is refreshing. One of my favorite posts of late has been his combination of “petting the dog” with “jumping the shark” thus creating “posting the pet” … I am plenty guilty of this over in Flickr (slideshow recommended).
- Some big changes at home of late. Very positive changes that raise big questions about the future, which is always closer than I think. In some ways my partner and I are complete opposites, but one of the things we have in common is that we’re both rather reserved, private people. It takes us some time to really integrate ourselves into a new circle of people. I’m thinking of this now in light of a theory I read about way back in high school, that has constantly popped up in my mind over and over since then. I like Erikson’s ideas but disagree with some of the values he includes in his stages of development. For example, my partner and I are on the cusp between two stages right now. The corresponding “crisis” per Erikson is “intimacy vs. isolation” and “success vs. stagnation” (… actually, Erikson uses the term “generativity” where I use “success” because he was referring more to producing children which has no interest for us whatsoever). So here we are, still trying to iron the details of “intimacy vs. isolation” as we look ahead to “success vs. stagnation” and I can see how a person’s methods of dealing with the former will significantly affect the latter. I can see we’ll have a lot of details to figure out in the next couple years but I think a lot of these details are going to figure themselves out, too. I’m wondering, in an excited what-will-I-get-for-Christmas way, what our backgrounds will make of us.
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March 29, 2007 3:30 pm at 3:30 pm
Mark
Happy blog anniversary!
As for the creation vs. consumption idea … is your hypothesis that creators consume more, too? I could see where that might be the case, but then I’d also that there may, in fact, be no connection, or that it varies temporally. As in right now I am consuming a massive amount of (written) content but creating very little. But that isn’t always the case.
And do you mean written to written? Any consumption to just written? Blog reading to blog writing only? And as you say, there really isn’t any unobtrusive way to tell. Just what is being read/consumed vs. just subscribed to/cursorily looked at…? Anyway, all rhetorical ?s
Good luck with the rest, too.
March 30, 2007 12:45 am at 12:45 am
nc
Ah, you really should’ve been out with me and two of my pals tonight (drinking tequila) because their dissertations are very similar to what you are talking about for your project and there was a lot of conversation about the very things you seem to be interested in.
Congrats on your anniversary. I suppose commentary on other aspects of the post can wait for conversation. I’m not so good in the comments section. And, it won’t be long now that we can actually have conversations again.
A lovely post. Thank you.
March 30, 2007 9:36 am at 9:36 am
epist
NC – oh, how I wish I had been there, raising a mojito to your tequilas and hearing all about those great ideas. But it’s good to know we have such conversations to look forward to! Hopefully, I can talk my sweetie into a night out tonight with some library folks, possibly including Mark – hi, Mark! Yes, I think I’m leaning toward the idea that creators consume more, but I don’t know how I’d study that. So instead, I thought about comparing creators to creators to see how their content consumption affects their output, but – as you pointed out- there won’t always be a correlation. Though I must say I admire your weekly reading summaries – what a great way to keep track of your reading history. And, in a sense, those summaries of your consumption then become your own content contribution,… would you say? It’s so hard for me to describe what I want to go after here… if I had plenty of resources in time and research, I would want to look at a much bigger picture of content consumption/creation. Look at blog writers who also publish in journals/books and, on a side note, see how often they cite other blogs. Perhaps a longitudinal study of the past five years to see how many published articles are citing blogs and/or started out as a blog post. These are pipe dreams, though. I need to get all these ideas into some sort of focus.
March 30, 2007 2:46 pm at 2:46 pm
Mark
Thanks for the further thoughts and, yes, I guess in this case my content consumption does directly lead to content creation. Just not exactly the quality or quantity that I’d like to be creating.