One Blog to Pool them All

Here are my initial ideas of how this could be organized.

Existing Infrastructure

We’ll take the current LISt blog, rename it to just “LIS” and grant all staff in LIS Editor access to the blog. Student workers and LIS-related people like department advisory groups will have Author access granted as needed.

Porting Content

Users and groups with existing blogs may move their content into the LIS blog by going to Tools -> Export -> Download Export file in their blog, then Tools -> Import -> WordPress -> Upload file and Import. After doing so, they should go to Posts -> Categories and use the Category to Tag Converter to change any custom categories their blog had into tags on the LIS blog.

Categories

The LIS blog will start with this set of categories:

  • Audience
    • External
    • Internal
  • Areas
    • Academic Consulting Services
    • Collection Management
    • Enterprise Technology & Infrastructure
    • LIS Administration
    • User Services
  • Institutions
    • Middlebury
    • MIIS
    • Language Schools
    • Schools Abroad
    • Bread Loaf
    • MMLA
  • Teams
    • Area Directors
    • Curricular Technology
    • Digitization
    • LIS Website

All other existing categories in the LIS blog will be changed to tags. In general, we’ll encourage the use to tags to mark things like posts that have photos in them, posts about particular workgroups, posts about particular projects, or other things that tend to have a more temporally mutable quality to them. Categories will be used chiefly for broad categories that change infrequently.

Private Blogs

The LIS blog will not be used to store private content. Groups, such as ACS, who wish to have a private blog should continue to use and maintain their blog in its present form or create new private blogs if one has not yet been set up.

Internal vs. External

Posts that are likely to be interesting only to LIS staff should be marked with the Internal category. Examples of this content might include a notice about LIS goal setting. Note that these posts would still be readable by the public, but that those subscribed to the public feed wouldn’t see them in the feed. Posts that are likely to have broader appeal, like a cookie party for students, should be marked with the External category, or both the Internal and External categories.

There will be links to both the External and Internal feeds on the blog homepage with a description of the content featured in each so that site visitors can choose how they will read about LIS.

7 thoughts on “One Blog to Pool them All”

  1. Barbara

    Having read the latest on go/ian, I’m wondering where the blogs that aren’t necessarily private but belong to individuals fit in. There’s Alex, Mike Roy, Chris, Ian. Having not spent time in the blogosphere I’m not familiar with the conventions! Style and content could be a bit of a shocker to users who are being strongly encouraged to enter this world for the first time. But the nature of the beast is to allow thinking out loud & we don’t want to even try to define content. Doubtless I’ll be elaborating on this theme at our meeting – be there!!

  3. Jess Isler

    I understand your concern Barbara, but I think that it may be those differences in voice, content, style, tone, et al., that will make the one blog idea a real success (or at least part of why it will be a success). Actually, I think we should encourage LIS writers to “come as you are”, and not to water-down their submissions. I also suspect that having these different voices will be one way to combat the potential stagnation of an overly formal newsletter form (like LISt, etc.)

  4. Ian McBride

    Increasingly, blogs are moving to the format where multiple authors post about their own, and often divergent opinions on news and events. Here are the top 10 blogs subscribed to through Technorati (admittedly, a selection biased toward technology-oriented people):

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
    http://www.techcrunch.com/
    http://mashable.com/
    http://www.engadget.com/
    http://gizmodo.com/
    http://www.boingboing.net/
    http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
    http://lifehacker.com/
    http://arstechnica.com/
    http://www.tmz.com/

    Of those, only boingboing, the official google blog and TMZ publish under a single (or close to single) author.

    Students follow the same basic model with multiple authorship on blogs:
    http://midd-blog.com/
    http://www.ephblog.com/

    Both of which have had one or more past and present authors who were particularly controversial. In my personal opinion, those authors and those posts are what make a blog actually interesting to read. Were it just a series of press release style committee approved posts with no particular flavor or personal style, I probably wouldn’t subscribe to the LIS blog.

    If style and content are a bit of a shocker to some… GOOD! Let them be shocked. There’s no better way to start a discussion than to put your own feelings, uncensored out there and see what people think. In fact, I think that was the advice given to us by Fred at the start of this team building process. You’ll notice after reading that post on my blog, and the comments, that I got good feedback on that post, revised my opinion of the project and will be working to develop something that will satisfy a broader set of people.

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