Thing 12

I loved Thing 12! I was glad to get the opportunity (i.e., being required to do something that I felt I didn't have time to do) to read some of the other participants' blogs and see that many of us are experiencing the same things. I think the two most important points about comments are: 1) comments encourage the author and let him/her know that he/she is being heard (it's somewhat depressing to see '0 comments' day after day) and 2) make your comment meaningful (I abhor those 'blanket praise' type of statements like 'Good point.' or 'I totally agree.' because they are SO meaningless.). I chose to make my extra-curricular comments on two of the blogs that I added to my Google Reader: Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk blog and the Rocks in My Dryer blog. Both of these writers inject a sense of humor into their posts that resonates with me as an educator and a mother of two preschoolers. I enjoy reading about about the situations that other educators and mothers encounter, especially when the writing is as well done as these two blogs are written.

Thing 9

I've spent several days looking at some of the blog search tools and although I found the Google search to be the easiest to use, I prefer finding blogs through the recommendations of others. Not necessarily word-of-mouth, but more a word-of-blog-ticker method. Almost every library-related blog that I visited had Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk blog in their list, so I subscribed to it as well. I think that it says something (hopefully something good!) when a blog has as large an audience as Doug Johnson's does. I did find an amusing blog about mothering preschoolers using Technorati, but I found that tool somewhat difficult to navigate....it was not clearly evident to me how to go about getting to the actual blog so that I could subscribe. I thought it was interesting that on Suprglu the vast majority of the posts came from Doug Johnson's blog. Maybe I just caught it at an unusual time. The most entertaining feed that I found was one called 'Love the Liberry' that recounts some of the amusing interactions that occur between public librarians and their patrons. Maybe I should start something like that for school librarians....