Connecting Librarian

After two weeks of various technical difficulties, I was finally able to join in on a session of Uncontrolled Vocabulary, a “weekly live interactive roundtable discussion of all things library”. Hosted by Greg Schwartz, Library Systems Manager for the Louisville Free Public Library, it is held most Wednesday nights at 10pm, US Eastern time, which made it 2pm AEST.

Uncontrolled Vocabulary uses Talk Shoe to host the live discussion and to record the hour for dissemination through podcast. The discussion is on newsworthy library-related items that have arisen during the week and are often suggested by listeners, through the use of an unvocab tag in del.icio.us. Greg has an Uncontrolled Vocabulary blog and also a Facebook group which sends out reminders about the upcoming episode.

It is 32 episodes strong now and I have been listening in since the 1st episode. It is entertaining, informative and a fun way to keep in touch with library news, whilst also doing some professional development activity.

So this week, I finally got onto the call - Uncontrolled Vocabulary #32 - Cranky people make good audio. The few communications issues I had encountered in the previous 2 weeks were finally bypassed through the use of Skype. I had a great time being a part of the call, even if I didn’t contribute all that much and I am looking forward to joining in again where possible.

If you haven’t listened to the podcasts, I highly recommend them. Greg is a accomplished moderator, there is a great group of regular callers and some very interesting topics arise, with conversations sometimes taking unexpected turns or presenting points of view you may not have considered.

Thanks Greg, from grateful listener and now participator. It is a lot of fun and I appreciate what you do to make it happen (nearly) every week.

I subscribe to the RSS feed from Digg. For those of you unaware of Digg, here’s what they say about themselves on their website:

“Digg is a user driven social content website. Ok, so what the heck does that mean? Well, everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see.”

Now I am a very slack Digg user, I only subscribe to the RSS feed, which delivers the top stories from the Digg homepage. I have yet to join up or submit anything, I guess I haven’t found anything worthy of submission, so haven’t felt the need and I don’t have the time to troll the stories and digg the ones I like, I leave that job to dedicated others. I am a fan though and it took great restraint for me not to use “I dig Digg” as the title of this blog entry.

I read a Digg post today that celebrated a milestone -

Digg Hits One Million Story Submissions!

That’s a lot of story submissions, a very small proportion of which, if ever gets the diggs needed to get it to the front page. Not bad for just over 2 years of existence.

I get anywhere between 50 and 100 posts each day from Digg, most of which I delete because they are generally of little or no interest to me. Many are plain fun, some are fascinating, some are very weird and others very informative.

So what do I get out of Digg? For me personally, of the posts I do check out, I get a lot of laughter, some great information and an awareness of what’s going on in the world. Some news I read on Digg, before I hear it elsewhere. Others I never hear about anywhere else other than Digg, especially US focussed stories, as I am in Australia. For example, the recent case of James Kim - CNet editor.

Digg also gives me an insight into popular culture. Stories only get onto the front page and then I get the RSS feed, if they get a lot of diggs. For them to get a lot of diggs, either the people posting the stories have to know a lot of people who they encourage to digg their entry, or it is an entry of great interest to a wide variety of people. Either way, its something that’s of interest to a lot of people and therefore I think that I, as a public librarian, should be aware of.

Its also one of the few RSS feeds that I get that is not library related and therefore helps to keep me in touch with life outside of the LIS profession.

If you want to know more about Digg, check out their website or the the blog entry “Beginner’s guide to Digg” from ProNet Advertising.

So thanks to Digg and all their members who post and digg those entries for me to reap the benefits. Here’s looking to the next million story posts. Long may you digg!