Nice roundup of cloud computing links

Thanks to Bibliothekia, I now have a better understanding of cloud computing...

Towards a taxonomy of blogs - what kind of blog is yours?

In a commentary (Towards a taxonomy of blogs ) for the Creative Economy, Margaret Simons writes:

Sometimes language can obscure as much as it reveals, particularly when the world changes faster than our ability to create new vocabulary.
I think we have reached this situation with “blogging.” Never the most beautiful sound, the word “blog” is now manifestly inadequate to allow us to talk in sensible ways about the many different things that are happening in internet based publication by individuals and groups.
We need new words.
...
I am going to make an attempt to invent some new words for different kinds of blog, in the hope that readers will dive in, add and improve.

Margaret then goes on to list:
Pamphleteering Blogs
The Digest Blog
The Advocacy Blog
The Popular Mechanics Blog
The Exhibition Blog
The Gatewatcher Blog
The Diary
The Advertisement
The News Blog

I wouldn’t pretend for a second that the above taxonomy of blogs is exhaustive or final. But I hope I have demonstrated that when commentators sneer at blogs and ridicule any suggestion that they could be a useful and important adjunct, or even replacement, for aspects of the mainstream media, they would do well to define their terms.
Blogs do some things very well indeed. Some of the things they do are old functions in new clothes, and some of the things they do are new.
I suspect that in a decade, the word “blog” will no longer be widely used. Instead we will have a whole lot of new words to reflect the diversity of individual publishing on the World Wide Web.

So, where does your professional blog / your personal blog / your personal blog about your professional life fall?

Bloggers and Coders

Roy Tennant recently posted an interesting distinction between library bloggers and coders on his Library Journal blog. (For the record, I fall into the blogger camp, but would like to learn some more coding).

One of the most useful things I have read recently (apart from some great comments to Roy's post) was this post from Ryan Deschamps (The Other Librarian), titled "Under the Hood of Web 2.0 : the top ten programming concepts for librarians to understand"
Thanks Ryan!

Our Searchlight newspaper column

A few weeks ago Walt Crawford posted a question about library newspaper columns and blogs.
I responded with some information about our Searchlight column, and Walt kindly included it in two pages on the PALINET Leadership Network and one of my favourite wikis, Library Sucess: A Best Practices Wiki.
Thanks Walt!

Searchlight is a weekly column in the IT/Computer "Switched On" section of the Townsville Bulletin newspaper.

The aim of Searchlight is "to help make your internet searching more effective, efficient and fun, by reviewing search tools, providing hints and tips, and helping with tricky search topics."

Our aim is to take the search expertise of librarians, and make it available to a wide audience in a medium they regularly use (newspaper), using language that they understand.

You can subscribe to Searchlight via email (instructions here) and there is a blog, which stagnated for a while, but thanks to Walt's enquiry, I've started updating again as of last week.