Pie Palace

And no, that isn’t a membership card in my pocket. I’m just happy to see your new catalog. Your FANTASTIC new catalog.

The crunky old catalog has been replaced with a shiny new BiblioCommons website. With a bit of searching, I managed to track down some info on BiblioCommons:

1. They have a terrible website.
2. Their founder, Beth Jefferson, appears to be a mix of volunteer-ist and entrepreneur (imagine that!).
3. Beth talks about BiblioCommons in a podcast I haven’t listened to yet.
4. They seem to snarf information from Amazon. (Their images come directly from Amazon)
5. I am addicted to annotating books.

As far as I can tell, they don’t have an official API. I managed to find a Drupal module that professes to do BiblioCommons stuff, but I don’t know enough about Drupal to tell what it’s up to.

And their login pages confuse cURL. Boo!

Blogawa.ca has two new contributors: OCInfo, a website about OC Transpo and it’s forays into the online world; and Real Grouchy, a blog that makes my curmudgeonliness look like an affectation (and follows swap boxes).

On Friday I spent a couple of hours combing Ottawa blogs to invite new contributors to the Blogawa fold. Sadly, my response rate is abysmal. For every three invitations I send, I get one response.

Are there any blogs you would like to see added to Blogawa’s blogroll? If so, please leave a comment on this post.

It might seem obvious, but it’s worth saying: blogs are about communication. Communication isn’t the same thing as dissemination/syndication, as it implies that readers can participate in a post with critiques, questions, and additional information. Reader participation makes a blog more than simple announcements, it elevates a blog from a simple homepage¹ to being a bazaar of ideas.

Participation can take many forms: comments being the most immediate (since the reader can easily browse them when reading the article); but automatic backlinking works too (see pingbacks). The irony is that adding that kind of a system to a blog makes it intrinsically more interesting, both to the reader and the writer.

Rant trigger: some guy presents an idea without any mechanism of receiving feedback. Honourable mention: dmo asks for tips on his blog, without providing a mechanism for readers to comment..

1. Remember homepages? Shambling monstrosities constructed of dead links, animated gifs, and text surrounded by <blink> tags. (back)