I’m curious if there’s any interest in a list of “other” blogs we should all be reading. Unlike the 10 Librarian Blogs, this new list would be 10 NON librarian blogs that should be read by librarians. I’m thinking of blogs that highlight things that are outside the LIS World, but are applicable to our what we do. Blogs that will help us do our jobs. Places we can go and read things outside our normal circles of knowledge.
This could be things like technology trends, marketing, human resources, intellectual property, publishing and search engines.
If you think such a list is worthy, let me know, or drop your list in the comments below. I’m not sure this will be worth pursuing. If there’s enough interest I’ll start working up a list.
Perhaps I need to go back and cull scripts
I’m sure I have a list of these somewhere. I have been trying to add stuff like this to the episodes we have had. I have a few tech picks that I can send to you by the usual channel.
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Stephen Kellat, Host, LISten
Top Ten Non Library Blogs
Great idea!
Here are my choices:
Counterterrorism Blog
MountainRunner
SWJ Blog
FedBlog
Docuticker
Free Government Information (FGI)
ResourceShelf
Danger Room
Lifehacker
RAND Corporation
Jon Udell and Slashdot both
Jon Udell and Slashdot both have a great deal of relevance to librarians.
My nominations
I’ll second:
1. Lifehacker
2. ResourceShelf
3. Slashdot
Otherwise:
4. Wired: Top Stories: is less noisy than, but similar content to Slashdot
5. New York Times feed for your specific school (for academic librarians)
6. Metacritic: film, books, etc
7. A List Apart: web design
Great idea–and ditto from
Great idea–and ditto from me on Lifehacker and ResourceShelf (though I’ve always thought of that as a library blog–it isn’t?)
I’d strongly recommend ReadWriteWeb.
Doggdott.us, which combines feeds from Slashdot, Digg, and “del.icio.us popular”, is a quick way to keep tabs on those three sites.
non library blogs
Here are my suggestions:
AltSearchEngines
Everything is Miscellaneous
Seth Godin’s blog
Read Write Web
eHub
Friedbeef’s Tech
Fern
I don’t have 10 but…
I really like boing boing, but took it off my bloglines since I only read it at work and sometimes there are links to NSFW subject matter. I also really like Not Martha for a craft blog, babygadget for a kid blog, grrl.com for a time when I thought I was feminist, and dailykos for when I thought i was a diehard liberal. 🙂
My Suggestions
Sounds like a fine idea. I too like ResourceShelf, Everything is Miscellaneous, and A List Apart. I enjoy the videoblog CommandN. Digital Campus is a useful podcast. Or are we limited to text?
Non-library blogs
BoingBoing,net — general tech and pop culture
Sivacracy.net — copyright, academia, pop culture
Arts and Letters Daily — general culture, good for what’s hot in academia
library link of the day?
library link of the day? Often the stories are sort of “applied librarian” topics.
A few recommendations from Mark
Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog : Covering the intersection of digital technology and research, teaching, and learning in the humanities, including search, data mining, website development and design, and programming. Cohen is the Director of the Center for History and New Media at GMU and a prime mover behind Zotero.
if:book : a project of The Institute for the Book. Lots of overlap with librariana but culturally broader also. Makers of CommentPress theme for WordPress.
3 quarks daily : an eclectic digest of Science, Art and Literature. These folks are awesome, but/and prolific.
PostSecret What hasn’t been said about the weekly PostSecret? Amazing pathos every week; joy and happiness on occasion.
The End of Cyberspace : Goodbye, virtual world. Hello, new world. By Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, “an historian of science and futurist.” Some overlap with libraries as Alex likes to pay attention to academic librarianship, at least, but far broader. As much as I do not generally like link dump posts, I have found more links of interest from Alex than everyone else combined.
Just a few of the non-library-related blogs in my aggregator.
they write blogs about non-library things?
http://www.slackermanager.com/ is a good one for those of us who think we have some sort of management ability (or who wish some of the people we work for/with had some)
I’ll add my vote for
Slashdot
Everything is Miscellaneous
Seth Godin
and boing boing (which I claim is safe for work, but then I’m in Australia where it seems we are less paranoid about NSFW than our American colleagues)
Re: other blogs
Seems like I find more new stuff through lists like this than through technorati, digg, del.icio.us, and whatnot.
http://arstechnica.com/index.ars for tech news & opinion – that and a gadget blog (your choice) and I feel fairly well briefed on general tech news.
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/ for information security issues.
Web-savvy mapping is a fast-moving area of technology that I think librarians should pay attention to. Google Earth is one of the most lay-user-accessible and well-known products of this, so I follow a few of the Google Earth-related blogs: http://www.ogleearth.com/ is my favorite.
http://www.techliberation.com/ – The Technology Liberation Front is a libertarian tech policy blog I never expected to follow, as a liberal. Many of the contributors are Cato Institute scholars, but they are entirely web-savvy and the discussion is erudite and civil. This blog routinely challenges my views and broadens my perspective on many issues.
Here’s a mixed bag of 10 non-lib posts
Here are my suggestions – good blogs for keeping up with fields peripheral to our own:
Pogue’s Post (the NYT tech columnist)
Mashable (all sorts of tech and web 2.0 sites)
Wired Campus Blog (Chronicle’s tech blog)
Chronicle Daily News Blog (a must for academic librarians)
Brainstorm (a group blog of higher education experts – great ideas and essays)
Presentation Zen (tips on how to present – lots of links to video presentations)
Putting People First (understanding the user experience)
Trendwatching.com (only once a month but great info on the latest consumer trends)
Google Operating System or Official Google Blog (gotta keep an eye on this company)
and one that has nothing to do with our profession:
SportsGeezer (great info for us aging jocks)
My votes (mostly design/usability related)
Smashing Magazine
Fadtastic
Boxes and Arrows
A List Apart
TrendSpotting
A Feed is Born
UX Matters
Design Observer
Mashable
The Sneeze
43things
43things
top NON-library blogs I read
I second the above vote for BoingBoing.net ; they frequently discuss copyright issues that are of direct interest to Librarians, plus it’s a fun technology news site with a great sense of humor and cool sense of fashion.
I also enjoy Pharyngula by PZ Myers, the political blogs LENIN’S TOMB and Stop Me Before I Vote Again, and Pro-Gun Progressive, though those have much more to do with personal interests than Library practice per se.
I also regularly read Rigorous Intuition, the Real History Blog, and Feral Scholar, George Washington’s Blog, the Disinfo blog/Memory Hole by Russ Kick, and the From The Wilderness Blog (the only ongoing portion of the formerly active FTW news site, now a research archive).
Some Essential Reading (and trying to avoid repeats)
O’Reilly Radar
Open Culture
Jonathan Schwartz
Technology Review
CHE: Wired Campus
yes, do a list!
yes, I would love to see a top 10 non-library blog list!!!
-TBL
http://talkingbookslibrarian.blogspot.com/
Non-library blogs
Bloomberg website. You can learn a lot about money management, investing, stocks, bonds, comodities. This information you will use throughtout your entire life. Also take the series 7 course just to learn about the stock market.