JOHN MEIER: July 2007 Archives

Somebody, who will remain nameless yet linked, insisted that I post more frequently. Mostly since I am brimming ideas and opinions that only seem to come out in meetings with lots of coffee.

If you want to create a Metablog, one blog or RSS feed from many, one way to do this is to use a Google Reader account. Reader is a Google too which aggregates (collects) all your blogs and feeds into one place. Once you have added a few, you can place them in folders with the Manage Subscriptions tool, which adds tags to each blog. For example, all of your library blogs would be tagged "library". You can share these folders as a single RSS feed like the one I have created for Science Libraries. In this way you are "mashing up" content in a way that is useful to a particular audience or for a particular purpose.

More once I figure out how to aggregate blog entries with a common tag from multiple blog platforms.

A few things that sparked in my brain during and after the Googlization of IT Services talk.

The browser has replaced the desktop and thereby Google has replaced Microsoft. All the discussion was about applications and whether Penn State should buy them or pay Google for them (and surrounding issues). Did they have this discussion a decade ago? What did they decide then? I think they chose purchasing from multiple companies and some home development... which I don't think many people would characterize as the best solution.

Google has secrets and like to keep them. I remembered speaking at ALA Annual with a few library vendors who were "partnering" with Google over metadata/indexing. Their summary: Google wanted to index/crawl/access their data while offering no data in return, only the benefit of more hits from Google (which one vendor tracked themselves) Also at the Google booth, no one who knew anything about development or how Google worked was present. Please demand data in formal contracts with Google.