Starting a Bicycle Club: Weblogs Revisited
By Walt Crawford
American Libraries Columnist
Senior analyst, Research Libraries Group
Column for January 2004
Many of you have gotten involved with weblogs since I discussed them two years ago in “‘You Must Read This’: Library Weblogs” (AL, Oct. 2001, p. 74–76). Quite a few of you read weblogs; some of you write them. More than a few, I’ll guess, have started a weblog and let it go dormant.
There are millions of weblogs (four million at last count) and some people seem to think that they’re revolutionary and that everyone should have one. I disagree—but first, a few updates from October 2001.
In that article, I mentioned nine weblogs. Seven of them—Craig Jensen’s Book Notes, LISNews, Library Stuff, NewPages, Librarian.net, ’brary ’blog, and Redwood City’s LibLog—are still going (although Library Stuff is now mostly about blogging and related technologies, Craig Jensen seems to spend more time on politics than on books, and ’brary ’blog doesn’t get updated very often). AcqWeblog went dormant in February 2002. Library News Daily is now Peter Scott’s Library Blog at blog.xrefer.com.
Now there are so many more! Try Gary Price’s Resource Shelf, Jenny Levine’s The Shifted Librarian, Charles W. Bailey Jr.’s Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog, and Peter Suber’s Open Access weblog. Peter Scott’s invaluable www.libdex.com includes a list with roughly 160 library weblogs from around the world, and the Open Directory for library and information science weblogs has 327 listings at this writing. I don’t know whether there are 1,000 library-related weblogs, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
A person attending a weblogging conference compared the “blog bubble”—the tendency to treat weblogs as more important than they are—to the “web bubble.” Seth Finkelstein (sethf.com), an experienced freelance filtering/censorware investigator, commented on this issue in his Infothought weblog:
“The problem [with blogs-as-revolution] is that if the optimist says, ‘This post will reach a million people,’ and the pessimist says, ‘This post will reach 10 people,’ and it ends up reaching 100 people, the truth isn’t in the middle. The pessimist was basically right, the optimist very wrong.
“It’s not bad to reach 100 people. But it’s not anywhere near a million people.
“The optimist says the equivalent of ‘Give everyone a bicycle and cars are dead, no more oil, all Middle-East geopolitics will change.’ And the pessimist points out, ‘No, it doesn’t work like that; only a very small part of the population wants to ride bikes or will deal with them.’ Then the reply is, ‘But isn’t our biking club great fun? I love biking. You love biking. Let’s all go ride around on our bikes and enjoy ourselves.’”
Bicycle clubs can be great!
If you want to create a weblog, go for it. Maybe you’ll generate a nice bicycle club—a community of people who share your interests. Maybe you’ll attract the attention of library leaders and other unsavory folks like me. You can exercise and possibly improve your writing talents, no matter how small your readership.
If you believe your library has uses for a weblog, then find some existing blogs, read some weblogging articles, and try it out. A portion of your library community will probably find it worthwhile.
While there are some excellent topical weblogs in the library field (for example, Catalogablog), there’s always room for more. If you care deeply about a topic, consider collaborating on an existing topical weblog or start your own.
But don’t set the bar too high. If you expect instant fame, broad reach, or revolutionary success, you’ll probably be disappointed. If you expect to reach a few dozen people, you may be pleasantly surprised.
The weblog power law
Weblog readership follows a power law (like Zipf Distribution and the Pareto Principle): A few sites are very widely read, a bunch more have a decent number of readers, and most have very few readers. The rough power law suggests that when weblogs are sorted by readership, the value for the nth weblog will be 1/n. If the most popular weblog has 50,000 readers, the 10th most popular will have 5,000, the hundredth 500—and so on. The real mathematics are much more complex.
Your chances of having 10–100 readers are much better than your chances of having 1,000 readers, let alone 10,000 or more. If you’re anxious to be in the “A-list” of webloggers, that may be a problem. But if you’re starting a bicycle club—well, ride on!
|
