Charting the Known Blogosphere

So to the ‘meet the neighbours’ Thing. I adopted a strict rationale to make myself get out there and encounter new people from different sectors and areas of the country: using a random number generator and the full list of participating blogs, pick 5 (originally 8, but I am supposed to be doing my job too ) blogs to read for this article. I did hit one or two empty blogs; for those, I just rolled again.

http://ireadlotsblog.blogspot.com/. First thoughts - ‘this blog looks familiar...’. It's the same design I had for quite a while, which threw me off for a few seconds, but that’s the nature of blogspot templates...  'ireadlots' is an Australian - first try and I got a non-UK blogger! - doing a library qualification by distance learning. She outlines a few things she currently RSS subscribes to (which in no way influenced the RSS feed inclusion to the right of this page :) ) and a few bloggers he has picked to follow throughout the programme. As it’s useful to get an outside perspective, I will be dropping in on this blog throughout the run of #cpd23.

http://maries23things.blogspot.com/ scores a substantial win by using the Manic Street Preachers lyric ‘libraries gave us power’ as her title. A little more experienced, Marie joined up after seeing the #cpd23 buzz of Twitter. The blog is a bit of a stub at the moment; nonetheless, another promising blog to follow.

http://loopylor.wordpress.com/ is a blog which existed before the advent of #cpd23 (though updates appeared a little uneven before it’s repurposing - that sounds familiar...). Whilst not blogging anonymously, a cursory glance around produced little to place ‘loopylor’ in her context (a Scottish law librarian of 15ish years who occasionally blogged when on the no. 34 bus and likes Scandanavian crime drama - okay, that’s something to be going on). She says that she has joined up to the programme to support a colleague, but also hopes to gain from specific areas #cpd23 will cover. Her coverage of thing 2 was useful, as I had neglected to leave comments on others’ blogs as I read them, something I’m going to correct now...

…

...back. On with the fun! http://cpdnotes.wordpress.com/ feels a little like a blog in development, with a few of the ‘widgets’ still to have content added; however, the stark whiteness of the layout is pretty nice. ‘lis-britt’ appears to work as a translator (which is entirely outside my wheelhouse - it’s almost as if I intentionally set out to find different people rather than doing things randomly) and is interested in:

• Firming up social media, her progress so far “a bit disorganized, quite spontaneous and not as planned as it could be” (this sounds much like my experience).
• Finding her feet as an information professional and meeting other people in the profession (again, spot on).
• Spending “some time on career planning and [identifying] opportunities that might match [her] skills and interests”.
• Using #cpd23 as “a framework to follow [...] without leaving the house or paying expensive fees”.

Finally for this little jaunt around the blogosphere, number 199, http://libpara.blogspot.com/. This is the most developed blog of the five, but possibly also the blogger least committed to doing cpd 23. Her ‘thing 1’ in full:

Dithered about cpd23 but decided to start and see what happens..... So why do it? Hmmm good question? I guess I believe quite strongly in cpd in general - being a Chartership Support Officer for CILIP makes me quite fierce about it. That'll do for now!
So - that's Thing 1

Fair enough... I guess there are several people who’ve started this course whilst not being sure if they’ll stick with it (I might be one of them...). Upon looking at her full profile, it appears that Libby, the blogger in question, went through cam23 at some point, so I can understand some degree of reticence to follow a programme which shares DNA with an already-undertaken course. Other blog entries are much fuller, and I’ve bookmarked a few of the other articles to look at later.

So that was a whistlestop (is 2 hours ‘whistlestop’? Maybe without all the back-tracking...) tour around some participating blogs. I may still drop in on the blogs of twitterquaintances, but wanted to meet some random bloggers first to get an idea of who else is out there. It was fun, but maybe next time I’ll just scroll and blindly click rather than using a random number generator; that was probably overkill.

2 more hours of work to go; should probably go and see what needs doing...