MPDL Blog
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This page is used to collect some notes regarding blogging in the MPDL context. In January 2008, an MPDL internal blog has been setup. In October 2008 the blog moved to the current wordpress installation. The early blog entries are still available in the initial b2evolution installation, but have been copied to the new area as well.
Blog versus Wiki[edit]
Blogs....
- support one-way communication of fixed information packages. After posting, a blog article shouldn't be changed any further,
- often allow commenting of postings[1],
- are sorted by date (last comes first),
- are comparable to mailing lists and news groups.
Wikis...
- support collaborative creating and editing of information. After its first creation, a wiki article is expected to be edited mercilessly by a group of persons,
- are organized in a structured way (see CoLab ;),
- are comparable to web sites and word documents in "change mode".
Blogs and Wikis can very nicely work hand in hand, e.g. integrate related news via rss feeds on the wiki start page - or submit a blog posting if you request comments for a wiki page...
Possible addressees and motivations of an MPDL blog[edit]
- MPDL internal to distribute non-public information -> not required? use mpdl-internal mailing list instead. The archive is available via https://listserv.gwdg.de/mailman/private/mpdl-internal/
- MPG internal / MPG library community for information about MPDL -> not required? use mpg-internal mailing lists like minerva-liest or mpg-info?
- World Wide Distribution to announce official MPDL news or individual viewpoints of team members -> could be a useful?
- World Wide Distribution to blog about "Nebensächlichkeiten aus dem beruflichen Alltag" -> no protection required, could be useful? -> see MPDL internal blog.
Examples...[edit]
... are out there everywhere, e.g.
- BioMed Central established a blog for posting announcements, see http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/bmcblog/
- DabbleDB Project blog, see http://blog.dabbledb.com/ for a typical blog accompanying an evolving web application.
- Living Reviews project blogs, see http://blog.livingreviews.org/ for an example of a seemingly external blog hosted on the MPDL blog server; this example highlights another functionality of blogs: they can be used to syndicate content. The overview over the latest Living Reviews publications is generated from the rss feed of the journal's blogs on the fly.
- http://planet.livingreviews.org - an aggregation of the postings on multiple blogs.
- http://blog.vlib.mpg.de - vLib news are distributed via a blog since the beginning of this year.
- OCLC collected a list of individual blogs from selected team members, see http://www.oclc.org/community/talk/blogs/default.htm. They evn call them the "OCLC's official blogs" ;)
- Stabi Hamurg blog, see http://www.sub.uni-hamburg.de/blog. The blog is quite prominently referenced from the Stabi homepage, but allows quite informal postings of team members (e.g. Hinter den Kulissen: Frühsport im Lesesaal). Sometimes the commenting option helps clarifying questions (e.g. http://www.sub.uni-hamburg.de/blog/?p=709) - and sometimes it is used for harsh critique (e.g. http://www.sub.uni-hamburg.de/blog/?p=656).
- http://planet.code4lib.org/ - Code4Lib is a mailing list, but also hosts an aggregation of blogs in the area of library technology. Two MPDL blogs made it inside...
Further Reading[edit]
- An interesting blog post shedding light on the blog policy of the BBC with regards to a real-world bad-press example.
- In September 2007, Cornelius Puschmann provided a very comprehensive overview on "institutional blogging" to MPDL staff. The slides and further comments are available in Cornelius' blog.
- ↑ Note: By nature, comments to official blog postings are often quite negative - as they channel possible user frustrations. This needs to be considered with starting a blog