1 Thing On A Stick

Hello everybody, my name is Nathan Hall. I am 28 years old and a part time Circulation Services clerk for the Rochester Public Library in Rochester, MN. I have been employed here for roughly a year now. And today marks my first post for the Minnesota’s seven multi county multi type library systems Library Learning 2.0 program.

Setting up a Blogger account is nothing new for myself. I have maintained a personal Blogger account off and on for years and have been required to update others for jobs in the past. I first joined Blogger during Beta testing and have since found Live Journal to be a far superior blogging site. I have been a part of the blogging community since high school in the early 1990's, back when those sites were labelled "personal everything/nothing" sites or EN for short.

That said, if I were hypothetically teaching a class at the library for newbies wanting to learn how to blog, I would probably use Blogger or Live Journal. I've noticed Blogger is now the MySpace to LiveJournal's Facebook. In other words, the general rabble that is afraid of HTML or complicated design schemes favor Blogger's clean, simplistic interface. More technically savvy users prefer LiveJournal. It has more features, more room for home-made applications, and in general is more aesthetically pleasing. I realize this is a gross generalization, but in general that has been my personal observation thus far.

In terms of Web 2.0 context, Blogger and Live Journal have both been incredibly adept at harnessing the power of "crowd-sourcing," as the wags at Wired are fond of saying. An anonymous Blog Spot user (and the communities he set up) played a pivotal indie journalist role at my school, the University of Minnesota, during recent class elections and Live Journal has done a surprisingly adept job of bringing obscure issues like tattoo copyrights into the public consciousness.

Thus ends my dissertation for the day. :)