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March 18, 2005
CIL Thursday: LISNews.com
Blake Carver took us on a tour of his crazy world of server-based madness. Since LISNews.com is staffed in part by bloggers, and Slashcode, the software that runs the site, is a collaborative blog application, he listed what he sees are the characteristics of bloggers (a.k.a. "What Michael Gorman got right"):
- Bloggers Ain't Editors
- Blogging is not always scholarly
- We are booster and hopeful
- We do move too fast
- Some of us are fanatical digitalists
- We are quick to judge and criticize
- We write too fast and emotional
- Sometimes we only need random facts and paragraphs
That said, LISNews a 4,000-member online librarian community filled with argumentative, funny, international geeks of all ages, political beliefs, jobs, and views, discussing news and new ideas, which has a mailng list (which you can receive instead of visiting the site or subscribing to a feed), RSS feeds, a collection of associated "journal" blogs (available to LISNews members).
But wait, there's more! You'll find 14,000 news stories, links and articles, 16,000 comments, 3,000 journal entries. And they sponsor LISFeeds.com, which is an aggregation of oh so many library and librarian feeds on the internet (LISFeeds is a good place to start if you're looking for library and librarian blogs to read). Not to mention the fact that Blake runs LISHost.com, a web hosting service geared towards libraries and librarians (my blog is hosted on LISHost, and I highly recommend the hosting service, since the price is good and the service is nifty).
Blake gets most of his story ideas cruising a good deal of Google News Alerts. Many other submissions are really opportunity finds by other editors and submitters, discovered in their digital travels. In terms of what might be considered "good" or "popular" stories, the "save the children" (from homosexuality, independence, Satanic messages, etc.) stories are really the hotbed beats.
He's got plans for the future. He's looking for funding, expanding the exposure of the site, more interesting, useful, and *original* stories, and all sorts of other technical fun.
Throughout the history of LIS* (both tech and library geeks will get that little bit of funny) family of sites, he's learned HTML, Perl, installing and configuring open source software, and then, with the advent of LISHost.org, server administration, all skills new to Blake. Now he wears many hats, everything from system admin and editor to referee. Blake and his services are an excellent case study to successfully learning technology skills by necessity.
March 18, 2005 8:51 PM