L&LR staff blog

Attending Journalist Roger de Bank’s blogging masterclass for library staff made me realise what a genuinely clever skill good blog writing actually is. Retaining someone’s interest has a 3-second window of opportunity before the prospective reader casts their eye elsewhere. Still reading? I’ll carry on…

Blog writing is all about attracting readers to your blog and retaining their interest by linking a series of ’hooks’ that pull the reader along the narrative without losing them in a fog of words. To be honest, I found developing a conversational style is much harder than I expected. 

Blog writing reminded me of when a radio DJ is trained to talk to the audience as though they are chatting to a person opposite them (the late, great John Peel style of delivery). Basically it’s about putting the author in the shoes of the audience to get the message across.

Learning the craft of blog writing from a journalist made me realise that I am not used to writing in a concise style, but found that  it’s important to apply the basic journalistic rules of:

who?
what?
when?
where?
why?
how?

Well, not this time….but perhaps next week! See Roger’s notes for some sound advice on writing for blogs.

Blog Notes

The more observant amongst you will have spotted that the visual theme of this blog (which used a WordPress theme called “BLOG.TXT“) has changed.

Unfortunately the old theme wasn’t displaying properly since the move to the new blogging platform.

This new theme is called “Journalist“.

So, we mourn for you, BLOG.TXT, for you are no more. That theme (and this new one, for that matter) was only ever intended to be a temporary ‘look’ until we found a theme we preferred. If anyone has a favourite WordPress theme they’d like to use on the L&LR staff blog, let me know and we’ll give it a whirl.

Dave Pattern’s HotStuff 2.0 blog analyses more than 800 ‘biblioblogs’ in an attempt to discover new and/or interesting topics…

“Just for fun, every day the last 3 blog posts from each blog are analysed to give a “Hot or Not” score. Points are gained for using words that haven’t been used frequently in the past, but lost for using words that are declining in popularity.”

Today, the L&LR staff blog is…
loading…

Joss Winn from C.E.R.D. has put together a Netvibes ’start page’ for his Learning Lab projects, and included (on the Research section of the page), some useful ‘widgets’ of information from the Library, including our blog feed, the podcast tours of the GCW, and search boxes for the catalogue and for the Institutional Repository.

You can see it at:

• http://www.netvibes.com/thelearninglab#Research
  

If you’ve got a few spare moments and you fancy a laugh, read the blog from the
Obnoxious Librarian from Hades! It has been described by the Internet Resource Newsletter (free monthly newsletter edited by Roddy Macleod, Catherine Ure and Marion Kennedy from Herriot-Watt University) in their Blogorama section, as being ‘far too funny’.  Its definitely worth a read!

I thought it would be interesting to take a snapshot of what we’ve been posting about since we launched these blogs – here are some fancy word clouds I created using wordle.net…

Our public, news blog:

The Winch:

This staff blog:

What does this tell us? I’m not sure…

You’ll notice that I’ve changed the visual theme of this L&LR staff blog from the Wordpress ‘default’ theme to a different, minimalist theme called ‘blog.txt‘.

I’ve only done this because people were getting confused about which blog they were posting to(!) – so the change is just intended to distinguish between this blog, and the public, L&LR news blog, which uses the default theme. (The Winch, the researchers’ current awareness blog, uses a different theme called ‘Cutline’, with some alterations that we’ve made ourselves.)

I’m not suggesting that this theme should be the theme we use for the L&LR staff blog for ever more… I’d very much like some suggestions as to a better theme.

You can search thousands of Wordpress themes, at: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

And once we’ve installed a theme we like, we can make as many little tweaks to the colour, fonts, design & layout as we like.

Any volunteers?

Paul