Showing posts with label book blogs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book blogs. Show all posts

Monday, February 16, 2009

Blog Criticism and Review



Lord Frederick Leighton (1830-1896)Study: At a Reading Desk Oil on canvas, 1877

Blog Criticism and Review

Right now, I am looking for criticism of my blog. I am asking for people to find fault with what I am doing so I can make it better for you to read what I am writing.

I have started by asking at Bookblogs on Ning for criticism of the design of this blog.

So far, the header has been changed, the font for the blog, some of the background colors, and a number of typos fixed. I am looking to do a little bit more. I have also identified a problem with Mozilla Firefox not reading the html line spacing commands for blogger. I am still not sure what to do about this. I contacted blogger help about this. Now, it seems to be working a tiny bit better. I also changed the number of posts visible on the page to five at a time. I had ten at a time. This should reduce the amount of time it takes to load my page considerably.

Mugshot http://www.blogcatalog.com/user/mugshot was nice enough to donate a new header. I have started a second conversation about redesigning my blog on blogcatalog. http://www.blogcatalog.com/discuss/entry/criticise-my-blog-dont-be-nice

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Daily Thoughts

Howard Pyle illustration of a handsome pirate, entitled "Buccaneer of the Caribbean", from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates. Howard Pyle is one of my favorite book illustrators.


Daily Thoughts

Library Thing, a social networking site which exchanges personal catalogs of books has called for a new cataloging system called, "The Open Shelves Classification". It is based on the idea of crowd sourcing for common subject headings. I rather think the idea is very interesting.

http://www.librarything.com/groups/buildtheopenshelvesc#forums

I joined Book Bloggers, a 975 member social network on Ning. http://bookblogs.ning.com/profile/BookCalendar

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Blog2Print, Morning Thoughts

Hello, I was looking at various sites last night. I decided I wanted to start posting and looking at sites that are part of the corporate world. Mostly, I have been focused on personal blogs. But, last night, I went ahead and decided I should probably start posting to and looking at "professional" blogs in the publishing and library world. I've always been nervous about this. I am not sure what effect this will have on my site.

I was at Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog and found a couple of interesting things. http://www.jwikert.typepad.com/ . The first thing I noticed were two services that turned blogs into books. The first was http://www.blog2print.com/ a service that for a fixed commission you can turn your blog into a book which people can purchase. It is a very interesting idea. There was also something called http://www.blurb.com/home/1/ which turns your blog into a book for a fee. It sounds kind of interesting, so because I like to experiment, I put blog2print on my website.

I found Joe Wikert's Publishing Blog 2020 by looking at the Really Strategies Blog. Really Strategies was one of the firms which sponsored the Publishers Reception for the Information Industry Summit. http://blog.reallysi.com/ . I often like to hop from recommended site to recommended site. There is a very different feel between corporate sites and personal sites.

Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog reminds me of Kimbooktu http://kimbooktu.wordpress.com/ . Both of the blogs are focused on book technology. Kimbooktu is more focused on physical book technology, but I still feel there are some real similarities between the two blogs.

I also am starting to look at some of the more prestigious blogs. I posted on http://www.blog.oup.com/ for a first time. For a while I was afraid, I might be thought of as ridiculous. But, it was an interesting experience.

One of the few things which professional blogs have an advantage over smaller personal blogs is that they can requst interviews with authors to be included in their sites. I can of course go get some interview from youtube to post on my site, but it is not the same as reading a transcript of an interview on a blog which is supposed to be authentic. It is not that easy for me to get a major author to committ to having an interview put on a small personal blog. There is usually an honorarium requested for this kind of thing. This is one of the few advantages I can see right now for publishing blogs.

This afternoon I returned Debt Is Slavery to my local library. There was nothing which I wanted to check out during this visit. There were a few titles which I had read earlier which might have been interesting, but, I would prefer to write a review from a fresh perspective.

The walk to my branch was pleasant. It was quiet. There were very few cars on the street. The weather was clear, crisp and cold. The only thing of interest was a spindly tree limb wich had fallen on the sidewalk.