Presenting the LISNews CIL Presentation

I’ve already mentioned I’ll be doing a little
presentation on LISNews at Computers in
Libraries in March, so I’ve been writing
about LISNews in my
journal much more than usual
in anticipation of that presentation. I have plenty of ideas on what I’d
like to talk about in D.C., but I’d really like to know what
You’d like me to talk about. Even if you’re not
going to make it to CIL this year, think about what you’d like to see if you
were going. What topics would interest you? What sorts of questions do you
need answered? Since I don’t have all that much time (45 minutes) I need to
try and squish 5 years worth of LISNews stories into just one little session,
so some things will need to be greatly abbreviated, or unfortunately, skipped
entirely. Are there any burning questions that have been lurking deep inside
of you that must be answered? Below is a bit of an outline I’ve cobbled
together to get myself started, feel free to
let me know your
thoughts.

For me, the best part of LISNews is the collaboration, so
here’s our big chance to write a great presentation together.

• Some kind of introduction:
  • What’s LISNews? (It’s a mailing list, blog, it’s a
    collection of blogs, it’s comments, it’s the news, it’s the authors, it’s
    all about the collaboration, and community)
  • What’s the story? (history,
    etc..)
  • How many library blogs are there? (LISFeeds)
  • Why are we better than the other sites? (Comments,
    journals, discussions, more visitors, more submissions)
  • Why are we worse than other sites? (Flamewars, bad
    feelings)

 

• The numbers: (statistics)
  • How many visitors do we receive?
  • How many authors are there?
  • How many stories, comments, journals, all that jazz

 

• Things about the stories (news)
  • The most popular stories (What makes a good story?
    What makes a popular story? What makes a story get a lot of comments)
  • The biggest stories in my mind
  • How do we find our stories, how do we decide what
    gets posted?
  • Some stories behind the stories.

 

• Things about the people (community)
  • The odd submissions
  • Funny user names
  • The regulars, the odd balls
  • Politics & other discussions that are popular
  • The journals

 

• Things about the site (code)
  • What powers the site? Linux, Slashcode,
    perl, etc… Geeky details
  • What’s the backend stuff look like? A tour.

  

• Thoughts on blogging and our place in the blogosphere
  (big picture)
  • Is what we do all that different from other sources
    of library news? (yes, and no, compared to LJ or ALA)
  • Our strength lies in our diversity and our numbers
    the good stories come from the submissions, it’s the "million eyes" theory
    for OS development applied to news gathering.

Please let me know
your thoughts or leave a comment below.