Rojo vs. Netvibes

It is difficult to actually compare these two web services. Rojo and Netvibes, while both providing RSS aggregating services, are actually quite different. While I would suggest that both companies would love to have you make their page your homepage, they offer very different reasons for doing so.

Rojo, in offering social networking features such as contacts (making friends with other Rojo users) and tagging, voting, etc. is forced to try and bring users into a new system. They are in a sense attempting to compete with services such as Facebook, in the sense that they want you to communicate news about the world (and presumably yourself) through Rojo. Given the vast array of choices in social networking software these days, I think that Rojo is facing an uphill battle. This idea of have RSS friends is really the only feature available in Rojo that I haven't seen in any other RSS-focused software. The tagging and voting, etc. has been covered by applications such as Digg, Redit, etc.

Netvibes has a very different strategy. They are providing a platform for clustering all of the social networking and news related services you already use onto one homepage. This is similar to other services such as Google's customizable homepages. This seems like a much more appealing option to me, because I already feel bogged down by the number of online services I subscribe to. If I can have them all in one place, that works well for me.

Blogging ethics and guidelines

While much of the guidelines for blogging that were given in this weeks readings seemed to fall within the realm of common sense, there were several in the first article, "Blogging Strategy 101: A Primer", that I found quite interesting. One such guideline that seems quite obvious in retrospect, is the idea of laying out a plan for the blog. I'd not really thought about the need to plan out the publishing schedule, the topics that will be covered and those that won't, etc. I just sort of thought of blogs as something that one starts up and populates with whatever content seems relevant at the moment.
Another guideline that would not have occurred to me, but is unarguably important is the strategic deployment of keywords. New readers are most likely going to be won via search engine results, so it only makes sense to have useful keywords appear in headlines and the body of posts so that they will be appropriately indexed by search engines.
Aside from these points, most of the others were not new to me. Ideas such as transparency and honesty should be at the forefront of the thoughts of all writers, regardless of their medium. Citation is easier than ever in a blog (simply provide a link to the source document, assuming that it is online) so there is no reason to skirk this duty.

In regards to the case studies, there were some very good blogs and some that I found lacking in several areas. The blog that seems most in need of improvement is the St. Joseph County Public Library GameBlog. The first thing I noticed about this blog was a posting headline that reads: "Say wha?," which completely obliterates the concept of keyword placement, given that the post has nothing to do with saying anything nor anything to do with "wha." Now, I realize that this is a blog aimed at a young audience, and that this particular post is simply a funny picture of a cat posed with a Nintendo DS lite, so I ought not to be too critical of it. However, there are other poorly titled posts, such as "The Results are In..." that do not in any way describe to the reader what results are in and would not be of any use in appropriately indexing this post in a search engine.
Another complaint I have about this blog is that there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the publishing schedule. There are some days that have multiple posts and then there are several weeks that go by between posts. One final complaint is that the author pages are scant in detail. The author photos are highly edited with effects that largely obscure the images (for reasons why this might be bad, consult Jakob Neilsen's "Weblog Usability") and there is little information that would help the reader feel any connection with the author.

The deep breath before the plunge

Well, here I am at the beginning of a new course. I don't do much social networking and I've never had any great urge to have a blog, but I appreciate their importance in the world today. I also think that there is great potential for their use in libraries, along with many many other types of social software. Exactly how and why this software is useful I'm not totally sure of, but hey, that's why I'm still a student. I've been working in an academic library for about 9 months now and my work environment has not strongly embraced social software. Email is still the electronic medium of choice and many seem reluctant to change communications habits. But let's face it--email works. Is there a real need for the adoption of a blog or a wiki? Does it become just one more thing to check, eating up valuable time? These are some of the questions that I would like to be able to answer at the end of this course.

A note on the picture above: it doesn't have any specific relevance to the post, but photography is a big hobby of mine, so expect a random picture to accompany more posts.