Blogging Section of SLA-IT

State of the Blogosphere, October, 2006

David Sifry, founder of Technorati, did a State of the Blogosphere in October.  His report has lots of good information, but this really stood out to me -- a blog's authority or influence.

The Low Authority Group (3-9 blogs linking in the last 6 months)

The average blog age (the number of days that the blog has been in existence) is about 228 days, which shows a real commitment to blogging. However, bloggers of this type average only 12 posts per month, meaning that their posting habits are generally dedicated but infrequent.

The Middle Authority Group (10-99 blogs linking in the last 6 months)

This contrasts somewhat with the second group, which enjoys an average age not much older than the first at 260 days and which posts 50% more frequently than the first. There is a clear correlation between posting volume and Technorati authority ranking.

The High Authority Group (100-499 blogs linking in the last 6 months)

The third group represents a decided shift in blog age while not blogging much more frequently than the last. In keeping with the theme of the maturation of the blogosphere, it seems evident that many of these bloggers were previously in category two and have grown in authority organically over time. In other words, sheer dedication pays off over time.

The Very High Authority Group (500 or more blogs linking in the last 6 months)

In the final group we see what might be considered the blogging elite. This group, which represents more than 4,000 blogs, exhibits a radical shift in post frequency as well as blog age. Bloggers of this type have been at it longer – a year and a half on average – and post nearly twice a day, an increase in posting volume of over 100% from the previous group. Many of the blogs in this category, in fact, are about as old as Technorati and we’ve grown up together. Some of these are full-fledge professional enterprises that post many, many times per day and behave increasingly like our friends in the mainstream media. As has been widely reported, the impact of these bloggers on our cultures and democracies is increasingly dramatic.

A note on Ranking 

For those of you who are new to Technorati's ranking systems, we establish a blog’s authority (or influence) by tracking the number of distinct blogs that link to it over the past 6 months. In this chart, we’ve looked at folks with at least 3 links or more and grouped them into four separate categories. In total, we’re looking at about 1.5 million blogs of the 57 million total. Even though I labeled the first group as the "Low Authority" group, given that these people are in the top 2% of all of the blogs that exist, the concept of "low" is purely in relation to the other groups above.

If you have a Technorati account, you can view the rank of your blog(s).  Questions for you to consider are:

• What is the rank of your blog?
• How influential is your blog?
• How influential do you want to be?  And how do you become that influential?

Joe Ann Clifton Student Award from the IT Division

As also posted on the IT Division blog:

Submissions are now accepted for the Joe Ann Clifton Student Award, offered by the IT Divison of SLA. This award is intended to promote participation in the SLA Annual Conference by an exceptional library science student. The recipient of this award will receive:

• Student membership in SLA for one (1) year.
• Reimbursement for expenses to attend the SLA Annual Conference not to exceed $1,500 and limited to the following:
  • Economy class round-trip airfare to the Annual Conference.
  • Student registration for the Annual Conference (including the IT Business Meeting).
  • Lodging during the conference.
  • Transportation during the conference.
  • Meals during the conference.
• Recognition and presentation of the winning paper at the Annual Business Meeting of the IT Division. The winner must be present to accept the award at the IT Business Meeting. The winning paper will be published in b/ITE, the Division newsletter.

Submission Requirements:

• The topic of the paper should pertain to the use of information technology. A paper which addresses a topic in a practical rather than a theoretical manner is preferred.
• Applicants must be enrolled in an accredited MLS or MIS program at the time of the award competition. Previous winners are not eligible for the award.
• Entries may be a paper which the applicant has written or is preparing for a class but has not been published. Only one paper per applicant will be accepted.
• IT reserves the right not to award the prize if it is the opinion of the judges that no submission is worthy of the award.
• IT will retain first publication rights of the winning paper.

***The deadline for submission is January 31st 2007***. E-mail your paper to Catherine Lavallée-Welch, IT Membership and Awards Chair, at [email protected]. Please include "SLA IT Student Award" in the subject line.

E-mail is preferred, but entries may be mailed to:

Catherine Lavallée-Welch
Associate Librarian
University of South Florida Lakeland
3433 Winter Lake Rd
Lakeland, FL 33803-9807
USA

A Technical Guide to Anonymous Blogging

Ethan Zuckerman recently published a guide to anonymous blogging on techsoup. Think it's easy to pull off? Think again; to do it right, you need to take into account local conditions, your technical competence, and your level of paranoia.

Faith Popcorn's predictions for 2007

This is worth reading or skimming.  Nothing here is specifically about blogs, but the last two paragraphs show where blogs (and other sharing services) can have an impact:

Our culture is suffering from an experience deficit. With the availability of online knowledge, we're claiming expertise based only on secondary experience. Now that everyone's a web-educated know-it-all, we're secretly longing for authority figures to guide and assure us with indispensable nuggets of wisdom that could only come from having actually accumulated life experience.

The Future: Respect for elders makes a comeback in the form of Ask Your Grandma hotlines and the proliferation of online video clips by seniors showing us how to tie knots and concoct home remedies.

Cingular to offer MySpace on cell phones

Quoting CNET:

Cingular Wireless, the largest U.S. wireless phone carrier, will offer a version of popular social-networking site MySpace.com on its phones in an expansion of their partnership, the companies plan to announce on Monday.

For an additional $2.99 a month, customers will be able to upload photos taken on cell phones, read and respond to MySpace e-mail, update blog entries and view and search for friends from their handsets.

Read the  full article for more details.

Article: Blogging 'set to peak next year'

Analysts at the Gartner Group have " said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.  The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs."

Corporate blogging policies

There are legal considerations for bloggers, of course, but what about business blogging policies?

Nancy Flynn of the International Association of Online Communicators suggests 12 best practices.

It's an old post (June 2005), but Fredrik Wackå compared the blogging policies of Feedster, Groove, Hill & Knowlton, IBM, Plaxo, Sun, Thomas Nelson and Yahoo!. A lot of it is common sense, so it's almost more interesting to see the unique elements:

• You can write on company time
• The company's goal in blogging
• You may disagree with the boss
• Stop blogging if the employer requests it
• Reach out to company PR if you're contacted by the media about a blog posting

For a contrarian view, Dennis M. Kennedy in Corante's Between Lawyers column suggests that most companies will already have corporate communications and/or Internet use policies which cover blogging and bloggers adequately.

Does your organization have a specific blogging policy? Anything notable about it?

New contributor to the blog

Please welcome a new contributor to the weblog, Section member Steven Kaye. Steven works in the insurance industry and I have a feeling he may have interesting insights on corporate blogging.

Many happy postings Steven!

Leading Average: Top Blog Trends

What are the current trends being spotted among blogs? Stuart Brown looked at the Technorati Top 100 Blog and tells us what he found.

My ah-ha from the list is the software being used by top blogs.  For them, custom blogging software rules.

EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers

If you haven't seen it, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a legal guide for bloggers in the U.S., which was updated in April 2006.  The site says:

Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don't want published. You might, for example, publish something that someone considers defamatory, republish an AP news story that's under copyright, or write a lengthy piece detailing the alleged crimes of a candidate for public office.

The difference between you and the reporter at your local newspaper is that in many cases, you may not have the benefit of training or resources to help you determine whether what you're doing is legal. And on top of that, sometimes knowing the law doesn't help - in many cases it was written for traditional journalists, and the courts haven't yet decided how it applies to bloggers.

But here's the important part: None of this should stop you from blogging. Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Internet bullies shouldn't use the law to stifle legitimate free expression. That's why EFF created this guide, compiling a number of FAQs designed to help you understand your rights and, if necessary, defend your freedom.

To be clear, this guide isn't a substitute for, nor does it constitute, legal advice. Only an attorney who knows the details of your particular situation can provide the kind of advice you need if you're being threatened with a lawsuit. The goal here is to give you a basic roadmap to the legal issues you may confront as a blogger, to let you know you have rights, and to encourage you to blog freely with the knowledge that your legitimate speech is protected.

To read the legal guide, go here.