{"id":186,"date":"2008-02-25T07:56:14","date_gmt":"2008-02-25T11:56:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/?p=186"},"modified":"2008-02-25T08:03:31","modified_gmt":"2008-02-25T12:03:31","slug":"on-blogging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/on-blogging\/","title":{"rendered":"On blogging"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking about blogging a lot lately, due in part to an email sent through the MASSYAC listserve and to the research that I do each week before my book group meeting, and also due in part to my brother’s recent entry on the third anniversary of his blog.<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0 (Happy Anniversary, by the way, Dan!)\u00c2\u00a0 By my standards, Dan’s blog is incredibly successful: he is creative, profound, and prolific, and the comments left on his blog reflect his large readership.\u00c2\u00a0 But this entry isn’t really about Dan’s blog – it’s about the world of children’s literature blogs.<\/p>\n

The email sent out to the MASSYAC listserve was from a children’s librarian announcing her new blog, and asking for those of us who already have blogs in place to send her the links to add to her blogroll.\u00c2\u00a0 Of course, I sent her my link, and added hers to my blogroll, and then I took a look at the collection of links that she had quickly amassed.\u00c2\u00a0 Lots and lots and lots of blogs on children’s literature, written by children’s librarians.\u00c2\u00a0 Lots of them.\u00c2\u00a0 And most of them much like the others, only differing really in the specificity of the opinions of the authors.\u00c2\u00a0 This is what I find each week when preparing for book group, too: for any given book that I’m looking into, there are several blog entries available to choose from, some giving suggested discussion questions, others raving about a book, some taking an academically critical approach to the book, some written by parents who have strong opinions about the book, and others a bit self-promoting (the “oh, look at me, I have an ARC of this book, because I’m special<\/em>“).<\/p>\n

The more children’s literature blogs that I read, the more I feel like I’m swimming in a vast, over-populated pool.\u00c2\u00a0 I know that I personally benefit from writing my blog, because in writing I am able to clarify my opinions and process my daily work events, and that alone makes this blog of value.\u00c2\u00a0 (Some could say here that I might as well just keep a daily\u00c2\u00a0work journal that’s not published on the web, but it’s the pressure of knowing that others are watching that keeps me writing on a regular basis.\u00c2\u00a0 If I didn’t have that pressure, I might not be as driven to keep this written record.)\u00c2\u00a0 But I do wonder whether my blog has value and relevance in the broader world.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not Roger Sutton – I’m just a hardworking small town children’s librarian with a decent education, much like most children’s librarians in the country.<\/p>\n

And then, by extension, I wonder about the value and relevance of all of those blogs similar to mine that are written by other children’s librarians.\u00c2\u00a0 Are we reading each other’s thoughts?\u00c2\u00a0 Are we communicating our ideas to one another?\u00c2\u00a0 Or are we each simply operating in our own little bubble,\u00c2\u00a0sending our words\u00c2\u00a0out to our\u00c2\u00a0imagined and hoped-for\u00c2\u00a0“audience” before moving on with the rest of our day?\u00c2\u00a0 I’d like to say that I’ll be better about reading the blogs written by my peers, but there are so many of them and there is so much work that I have to do each day\u00c2\u00a0– I doubt that I’ll get around to reading much other than “Read Roger” on a regular basis.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0And that’s a shame, really.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking about blogging a lot lately, due in part to an email sent through the MASSYAC listserve and to the research that I do each week before my book group meeting, and also due in part to my brother’s recent entry on the third anniversary of his blog.\u00c2\u00a0 (Happy Anniversary, by the way, … Continue reading On blogging<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}