Go Google Yourself

September 15, 2005

Filed under: Navel gazing — dougj @ 4:12 pm Edit This
It’s been just a little bit of crazy around here with the start of school, so I didn’t get to check my Blogline feeds until just before bed last night. (That’s about 8:30 among us wild and crazy Minnesotans.) It was then I found a new delight!

I am a self-admitted Google addict and love all the tricky little things it can do (despite the Onion article claiming the search engine wants to destroy all information it can’t index). So I was happy to see in the Google Weblog that one can now just Google blogs using Google Blog Search.

Although my karma now may be seriously at risk, I Google Blogged myself. (Come on, admit it - you Google yourself now and then when you think you are alone.)

After wading through search results for far more illustrious “Doug Johnson’s” than myself, I found a few hits where some poor soul on his/her blog has linked to something I’ve written.

Now I have been writing for professional journals since the earth was cooling, so finding links to my articles was not too shocking. But I found links to entries in my blog which has been in existence less than two months!

There is a whole, big, whopping blogging sub-culture roaming about cyberspace that I didn’t even know about. It’s like finding a big bunch of elves in the backyard of a house you’ve lived in for 10 years. I’m amazed by the speed which thoughts now propagate in the blogosphere - even crackpot ideas like mine.

I’m going back to the NECC 2005 webast of David Weinberger’s keynote “The New Shape of Knowledge” in which he argues that knowledge is less static entity and more fluid conversation. I’ll be ordering his book too - despite the archaic, staid format.

Still trying to get my mind around this. Are you beginning to look at knowledge as not just facts, but dialog?
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2 Comments »
Yes - it is truly amazing. Here is what is rolling around in my mind… We have some very well established criteria for judging the reliability of web sites. What criteria should we add to evaluate blogs? I will be teaching evaluation skills to 9th and 10th graders over the next few months, and need some serious help with this issue!

Comment by Jacquie Henry — September 16, 2005 @ 5:49 am

Karen Schneider’s comment that “I do believe information is more of a conversation than it was in the past, and that librarians who fail to understand that are not coming along” still resonates; especially when we look at how new technologies are changing our whole perceptions of information-delivery. But critical thinking is still critical thinking, no matter what the format or framework, and that’s really what we need to concentrate on.

Comment by Alice Yucht — September 17, 2005 @ 1:46 pm