Blogs

There was some discussion about blogs at the all staff meeting the other day.
I have little sense of what penetration Catalogablog has, or how widely read Jon Udell’s weblog is, or who looks at Dave Beckett’s JournalBlog. I do know that they are all valuable, well-informed resources. They are different. David Bigwood, who does Catalogablog, rarely offers opinions. He collects, and it is clear that he has a wide range of sources, across many topic areas. I will already have seen some of what he posts, but some of it will be new to me. Udell, on the other hand, is very much a commentator, not unreasonably as his blogging amplifies and complements his journalism. Dave Beckett is very terse; he notes developments of interest focusing on semantic web, rss, rdf, and related. I can be confident that he will usually cover anything of interest on these topics.
It is true that many blogs do not reward the time spent on them. However, when you find ones whose voice you trust they are very effective ways of keeping up, and will typically point at others that may also be useful.
Although, I may actually visit two or three weblogs from time to time, I look at a much larger number through an RSS aggregator, currently SharpReader in my case.