I’m sure you’re all familiar with the passion quilt meme by now. I was tagged by my new friend, Stephanie Zimmerman.

I hope it speaks for itself.

Think about how the message might have implications for libraries as well.

Original photo by CreativeSam can be found here. I find the frame with apparent copyright indication confusing given the Attribution-Non Commercial Creative Commons license indicated on the Flickr page. I’m going with it.

I may as well tag some peeps, so let’s do these five (with apologies if you’ve already been tagged and to the dozens of people that I could have tagged here):

Sarah Cohen
Dave Free
Chadwick Seagraves
Iris Jastram
Joshua M. Neff

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to increase the audience for Uncontrolled Vocabulary. Right now, most episodes are downloaded by about 200 people within the first two weeks. I couldn’t say how many of those 200 actually listen to the show. I’d like to think most of them…eventually.

I’ve also been thinking and reading about online identity, reputation management and personal branding. My proposal on the topic for Internet Librarian is under consideration by the planning committee, even though I’m far from an expert in those areas. But that’d be a great reason to work towards becoming one.

As I was discussing my presentation proposal on Twitter a few weeks ago, my good friend and regular participant on Uncontrolled Vocabulary, Connie Crosby pointed me in the direction of a video of a presentation by Mitch Joel (direct link to file in qtl format), who blogs and podcasts over at Six Pixels of Separation.* Mitch’s focus both professionally and on his blog is digital marketing and personal branding. His was a message I really needed to hear.

In the event that you don’t have time to check out the presentation (Note: make time), I’ll highlight one thing. He shows a slide with the statement “It’s all about who you know” and leads the audience to raise their hand in agreement with this statement. You can’t see them in the video, but it’s clear that some people are hesitant, sensing that it’s a trick. And indeed, the next slide reads “It’s about who knows you.” I’m sure when laid out in this fashion, that seems pretty obvious, but in context, it certainly triggered something in my brain. Watch the video to hear how it relates to making the transition from talking to listening and plugging into what your readers/listeners/communities are all about. I’ve been turning it over in my brain ever since (and acting on it - more on that in a future post).

I needed more. I found Mitch’s blog and podcast and subscribed to both immediately. I started with Six Pixels of Separation episode 98 and found myself with something to say on the topic of blogrolls. I also noticed that Mitch is very much engaged with his community and really likes to include audio comments from his listeners in the podcast.

So I decided to join the conversation, recorded my comments and sent them to him. Sure enough, he included them in episode 101, which was released over the weekend. A little more fanboy giddiness for me.

I suspect few of you would disagree that librarians are, for the most part, poor self-promoters and marketers. I plan on doing my part to change that and the first step is paying attention to the people who know what they’re talking about. Starting with Mitch Joel. I’m slowly incorporating some of the other thought leaders in the digital marketing and social media spaces. Recent additions include C.C. Chapman’s Managing the Gray podcast and Chris Brogan’s blog. I’ve also been dabbling in the content of Seth Godin, Joseph Jaffe and others.

This stuff is important, at least to me. I’m adding a new Marketing category to the haphazard taxonomy for this blog to encourage me to talk more about it. And please note, my interest is NOT in marketing libraries. There are plenty of other people worrying about that. I’m talking about marketing librarians. I hope to find ways to demonstrate the importance of that distinction to others in our profession. Who’s with me?

* Anyone interested in the intersection of podcasting and marketing would do well to check out a number of the presentations given at Podcamp Toronto 2007. I haven’t looked at the content from 2008, but it looks really good as well.

Before I fulfill the promise of the post’s title, let me update you on my so-called TwitteRetreat. It lasted about three days, during which time I really didn’t check in with Twitter at all. On the third day, I popped in once, remarked on the strength of my compulsion to get back in the ring and left for another day.

The following day, I came across a situation where I needed the counsel of my trusted network. They came through and then some. I knew right then I wouldn’t be able to stay away forever.

So I’ve renegotiated my relationship with Twitter. I’m only following the conversations intermittently, during down times. I’m being more selective about updating my own status. I’m only monitoring direct messages and replies to my tweets. This has allowed me to stay part of the community with far less moment-to-moment commitment. It’s far more manageable and I’ve had little trouble letting go of the things I’m missing and am not trying to catch up on conversations gone by.

Anyway, a situation arose on Friday that I found perplexing and which reminded me that, at the end of the TwitteRetreat post, I’d committed to saying more about how I manage my social networks. I received a friend request on Facebook from someone with whom I was not familiar. Not all that unusual and not something I shy away from.

On both Twitter and Facebook, I have an informal rule that I be conversational with anyone who wants to be part of my social network. Many of you reading this know that already. I want to feel connected in some way to the people who I see in my friends list on Facebook or my followers list on Twitter. It’s really a pretty low threshold for calling two people connected and it usually consists of me sending a message to the requester asking the following two questions: “Who are you? Why follow me?” On Facebook, the second question is “Why be my friend?” This is known affectionately (or otherwise) by some as “The Quiz.” I point out in my messages that these questions are meant conversationally, not curtly. Hard to do much with 140 characters interview-wise.

The responses I get to the questions are varied, but the vast majority of people at least answer. Some people are really appreciative of the message and my efforts to engage. One person told me that they actually respected me more for asking. It is, admittedly, a hoop of sorts, as I’m not interested in people who are just padding their numbers. In every case where the person has responded with something more than “Facebook said we should be friends,” I’ve been able to sustain enough interaction and conversation to consider the person part of my world. The relationship has meaning and context.

And now, back to our story. So I sent this person my usual introductory message, including the quiz. A day or so later, when I was dipping back into Twitter, I noticed the very same person requesting to follow me on Twitter. “OK, this person really wants to engage me,” I’m thinking to myself.

Twitter, unfortunately, does not allow me to direct message someone who doesn’t follow me (which is a good policy to avoid spamming and such, but I’d like an exception for when someone you don’t know is requesting to follow you).* So in order to make an another attempt to chat, I accept the request. And because I always follow people who follow me, I also start following this person at the same time. I send the new follower a direct message saying that I’m going to skip the usual quiz, since I expect to chat on Facebook. No response.

A few days later, I saw that this person was sending out tweets, so I thought I’d make another attempt at interaction. “Hi there. Still haven’t heard from you here or on Facebook. Don’t want to conversate? ” Without directly quoting the response I got, the person essentially said “Not really. Want to save Facebook for real faces. Have had great conversations here.”

Mind you, I’d have taken a conversation in either place, but now this person has done two things: 1. Indicated that, despite seeking great conversations, they don’t want to talk to me. 2. Wasted my time by telling me they want to be my friend, when in fact, they don’t. And why would you ask to friend me on Facebook, if you are saving Facebook for real faces?!?!?!

I was blown away. With Facebook, it’s trivial to ignore a friend request, which was my next move. On Twitter, the situation is a little trickier. In order to attempt conversation, I had to accept this person as a follower. Once it is clear that I don’t really want this person as a follower, I have no choice but to block them. I really hate doing this. I’m sure this is a perfectly nice person with whom I have no interest in creating static. But I don’t want people to be part of my Twitter conversation who aren’t willing to engage me personally. Period. Your approach may be different and that’s great.

This is actually the third person I’ve blocked for similar reasons. When I mentioned this on Twitter, a very interesting discussion emerged. I was asked about how I define my social network and how this compares with my approaches to Flickr or this blog.

Flickr is an interesting case. I actually have no control (to my knowledge) of who adds me as a contact, but I have complete control of which people I consider friends or family members. Most of my pics are only available to friends and family. For someone to be considered my friend on Flickr and thus have access to images of my personal life, I expect to have already established a relationship with them somewhere else, whether it’s on Facebook or Twitter, via the comments on this blog or somewhere out in the real world. Flickr is not, in and of itself, a place where I network. For other people, it is.

And that’s the main point of what has become yet another too-long blog post: everyone has a different idea of where social networking happens and what it looks like. I surely have a different philosophy than most of the people who read this blog. But it’s essential to me that I connect directly with the people that I consider to be within my social networks. It’s the primary element that gives it any meaning at all.

* Jessamyn West has indicated to me that Spaz will allow you to direct message someone who doesn’t follow you, but my attempts to do so were fruitless.

The CommonCraft Show is a series of engaging videos explaining Web 2.0 technologies. They’ve finally tackled podcasting:

Michael Stephens’ post on reaching (and missing) his five-year blogiversary reminds me that I’m in the same place. This blog started under the name Planet Neutral on March 19th, 2003 with a post entitled “Oh great, another blog.” It wouldn’t become Open Stacks for another month.

Much has happened in the five-plus years since. MSLIS completion, relocation, marriage, employment (four different positions in the same organization!), house acquisition, two amazing children, six hundred or so posts, three different podcasts, many conferences and speaking engagements and a gaggle of new friends in library land. Thank you all for being a part of this fascinating journey. Here’s to five more years of wonder, discovery, passion and friendship. Cheers.

And congrats to Michael Stephens for all he has accomplished in the same span. Or should I say Dr. Stephens?

I recently subscribed to the Upcoming feed from Readburner, a site that aggregates items shared by users of Google Reader. I like the feed quite a bit, because even though it repeats some things I’m subscribed to and has a fairly high volume, it puts a number of different voices in my field of vision that I wouldn’t otherwise see.

Today, I saw a post that resonated with me. The source feed was Daily Blog Tips and the post title pretty much tells the story: Twitter Less, Blog More!

I’ll talk more about my ongoing dialectic concerning Twitter in an upcoming post. I think I’m heading in the right direction with it. But here’s what I’ve noticed. As soon as I pulled back from Twitter, my desire to write on this blog increased significantly. I posted five times, including the post announcing my TwitteRetreat, in the first two days of said pullback. I have another post just about written and three more in my head for this weekend, not including this one.

I could easily disseminate those thoughts directly to my Twittersphere. 140 characters and be done with it. And while that has the benefit of immediacy, both in delivery and response, it also misses a huge potential audience. The Feedburner widget in this blog’s sidebar reflects somewhere between 1050 and 1100 subscribers to this blog. Even if we assume a certain number of duplicate subscribers and people who don’t actively read their feeds, I still probably have two to three times the number of active followers of my thoughts here as I do in Twitter (where I have 130). This is partly because of the restrictions I place on my Twitterstream, partly because of the length of time I’ve been dedicated to this space.

And as one might immediately recognize, the 140 character maximum has its limitations on how fully it allows one to develop a thought. Such constraints can be useful. I had a professor who said that you can always say things more clearly with fewer words. Distillation is not a bad thing. But taken too far, you lose the ability to provide context for your ideas. This lends itself to confusion and possible misinterpretation.

Stepping back from Twitter has reminded me of the joy of not being limited, of having a limitless space to call my own. Of course, I could use a good editor, but who couldn’t?

Sorry for the blog spam. I’m experiencing feed issues due to some combination of upgrading to Wordpress 2.5.1 and setting Wordpress up for Subversion upgrades moving forward. This is a test post to see what’s going on.

Update: If I use the ?feed=rss2 syntax instead of wp-rss2.php, it seems to work fine, so the Feedburner settings have been updated accordingly and you shouldn’t miss a thing. If anyone has any clue why this might be, I’d be interested in hearing from you.

It’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity to rant about the misuse of the term podcast. But I’ve got a good one and can’t seem to help myself. I suppose I’m something of a podcast bigot when it comes to my staunch defense of what makes a podcast a podcast.

What makes this rant particularly special is its basis on a piece that appears in the April 2008 issue of Computers in Libraries magazine. This issue contains an article entitled “Creating Communities With Podcasting” by Angela L. Jowitt, who is at the library of the Universal College of Learning in New Zealand.

The article starts innocently enough with a basic description of how the author came upon podcasting and how it fit into the overall 2.0 mentality that the library was trying to embrace. She then moves on to discuss recording and publishing “podcast files” on a trial basis. The use of the phrase “podcast files” should have been a red flag, but I read on blindly.

Here’s where I gasped openly: “As we were making the files available simultaneously, a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed was not initially set up.”

Come again? We’re podcasting without an RSS feed? I was so stunned by this unexpected twist in the article, I didn’t actually read the following sentences. We’ll come back to those.

Instead, my eyes were drawn to a small screenshot of the “podcast” page on the website. The lead sentence reads “Podcasts are digital audio recordings made available over the internet.” I’m hoping that the audience of this blog does not need me to identify the shortcomings of this statement. Suffice it to say that making a digital audio recording and sticking it online does not a podcast make. Wanna read more about that? Check here or, better yet, here. Or the latter part of this post. And then of course, there’s the whole ALA 2.0 Bootcamp mess. I’ve been beating this drum since March of 2005.

There was a glimmer of hope as I returned to the article where I left off:

As we were making the files available simultaneously, a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed was not initially set up. However, we are now working on this in order to turn our digital audio files into true podcasts, which are files broadcast or published over the internet. This will also make our podcasts available for subscription using a podcatcher, which is an RSS aggregator.

Sigh. I enjoy the distinction made between podcasts and true podcasts. Why not entitle the article “Creating Communities with Something Like Podcasting but not True Podcasting”* or somesuch? But anyway, I was given some glimmer of hope that a “true podcast” would emerge from this initiative, even if it didn’t in the article.

Before I go on with my rant, I want to make sure you understand that the approach that UCOL is taking in their podcasting initiative, as far as starting modestly and soliciting feedback, is great. And the content, although I haven’t listened to it, appears relevant and worthy of production. I’m not intending to condemn their efforts here.

The real reason this irks me so much is not because this group of librarians doesn’t quite get it. It’s because a major library magazine devoted to technology initiatives in libraries fails to see the problem and thus disseminates piss-poor information throughout the library community. A magazine that lends its name to a conference where I’ve presented on podcasting multiple times. How does this happen and what can I do to prevent it from happening again? Your feedback is welcome.

And again, I don’t want to overstate my issues with the article on the whole. There’s a lot of good information about recording library content for distribution online from a beginner’s perspective. But the fundamental misunderstanding of what RSS brings to that distribution effort makes me shudder.

So, as I said before, I had a glimmer of hope that there would be a podcast in the end. So I visited the library podcast page pictured in the article. Sure enough, there’s a nice prominent RSS symbol on the site, leading to an RSS feed. Great!

Good news is that the feed works and, in the end, UCOL is in fact providing a “true podcast.” They haven’t updated it since January, which is a strange thing to do if you know that an article about you is going to appear in a widely distributed magazine in April, but hey, that’s not my call.

Bad news is that there’s no explanation on the page of the role of this RSS feed or anything about subscribing to it. So in the end, they really aren’t doing anything to highlight the very thing that allows them to properly call it a podcast. And thus, the diffusion of confusion continues.

</podrant>

* It’s also worth noting that the article in no way, that I can see, discusses the building of a community through podcasting.

Update: My good friend Dgold notes in the comments that it is inaccurate to limit the definition of podcasting to content syndicated via RSS. He highlights ATOM as another specification that allows for syndication of media content. In this regard, he is absolutely correct and I thank him for pointing this out. I tend to use RSS as a euphemism for all syndication formats, but that’s kind of like referring to all online audio files as podcasts, isn’t it? Check the rest of the comments to follow the discussion.

Meredith Farkas tackles the issue of what to tell newcomers to the profession when they ask how she’s done so much in so little time in the profession. Seeing as I’m clearly suffering from logorrhea this weekend, it made more sense to talk about it here, rather than in her blog comments.

The ultimate question from the post: “What advice would you offer a new librarian looking to start speaking, writing and networking on a national level?”

There’s a part of me that says they have the wrong goal in mind (excepting the networking part). As Meredith said, most people who are seen as movers and shakers didn’t set out to be movers and shakers.

But there’s the other part of me that says there aren’t any barriers to writing on a national or global level, so what’s the issue? Just do it. That’s how I got started. There are so very few impediments to self-publishing online that it’s unfathomable that anyone who wants to be writing isn’t doing it.

But as I said, I’m not sure I can recommend focusing on speaking and writing as a goal in and of itself for the new librarian. Following the sage wisdom of Walt Crawford, first have something to say. Figure out what gets you excited in the profession (or outside of it!) and write about it. Get that blog started. Share your passion. Share your experiences. But remember that the writing, while immensely valuable, is not the experience itself, at least not for most newbies.

At the same time that you’re writing, join conversations, whether on other blogs, Twitter, wherever. And when you join those conversations, don’t forget to tell people what you’re doing and where to find you. Self-promote. Tactfully, yet shamelessly. We’re notoriously poor self-promoters in this profession. It’s an undervalued, misunderstood skill amongst library professionals.

Soon, you’ll find that you’re the one starting conversations. And that’s when you’ll know that you’re starting to find your unique voice. Those conversations are often the ones that turn into mainstream articles or conference presentations.

And if you plan on speaking, you’d best be submitting proposals, because until you’ve established yourself as a speaker, people aren’t going to come looking for you.

If I can be said to be on the right path to “making a name for myself” in library land, I attribute it to two things: good timing and, exactly as Meredith said, “seeing an unfilled need and filling it.”

Good timing, because I started my blog over five years ago, when there weren’t nearly as many voices in the blogosphere. I was noticed simply for listening to Sonic Youth, which I’m not sure is a realistic expectation these days. [Note that said post from Mr. Cohen was my first taste of librarian-related fanboy giddiness.]

That link from Library Stuff was really the beginning of everything else that happened to me outside of my day job. It crystallized the potential of the blogging medium and emboldened me to keep going. Not long after, I stumbled into something of a niche searching for new library blogs. This led not only to my stint as the LIS Weblogs editor at DMOZ, but to LIS Blogsource (big ups to all five of you who remember it!) and to my first national conference presentation, talking about blog search.

And again, good timing when it came to seeing a need and filling it. Librarianship needed a podcaster. I needed something to obsess over. A library podcaster was born.

“Anyway, enough of me talking about me,” he said self-referentially. In the end, I agree with Meredith: Writing and speaking have been benefits of being passionate, curious, motivated and willing to put myself out there. I didn’t set out to be a writer/speaker. I still don’t think of myself that way. In fact, one of the main draws of librarianship was the opportunity to “do the research and not write the paper.” But that’s a different blog post for another day.