I have a pile of things that I have been meaning to blog about for some time, but things have been so hectic of late, that it just hasn’t happened. Rather than leave them on the boil any longer, I thought I would blog a brief bit on each one and leave it to you the reader, to decide whether you want to look at it any further. They are in no particular order.

If you want to know about bloggers, then Pew/Internet is your source. They released the results of a study “Bloggers: a portrait of the new storytellers” in July of this year. The full report is quite long, but the summary of findings at only 5 pages, is enough to give the gist of the report. The study was based on “a telephone survey of a nationally-representative sample of bloggers”. I found it interesting to see where I as a blogger, fit into their results.

Jessamyn West, of Librarian.net fame, did a great write up for Web Junction - “Those darned users“, on public access computers (PACs) and the best way to manage them in the library environment. It is short and full of good practical advice of getting the best of out your public PCs, both from a staff management and a patron use view.

The difficulties of being a manager are very eloquently expressed by T.Scott in his blog article “Decision making“. He talks about his experiences as a manager, trying to balance staff and work priorities and how realistically it doesn’t always turn out best for both those groups. A great reality check and reassurance for all managers out there.

One that I came across today through Digg. “RFID acts a life saver for miners” talks about a mine operation in Sweden, which has all its miners tagged and with readers distributed throughout the mine so they know where each one is at any given time. A fascinating use of this technology. Makes you wonder what else it could be used for.

There has been a lot of discussion and concern about how the short cut language used in text messaging and instant messaging. A study has been conducted over 2 years, on 71 Canadian teens and their more than one million words of text messaging. The result - only a small part of the text language is being shortened and it is being done in such creative ways, which could strengthen language skills. Check out the report at the Toronto Star newspaper “Texting doesn’t hurt grammar: Study“.

Finally, an article from Jack Maness of the University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, “Library 2.0 Theory: Web 2.0 and the its implications for libraries.” He tries to define what Library 2.0 means, as there is no real definition as yet. It will be interesting to see if his definition and theory get taking up as the standard.