Rachel Singer-Gordon has been thinking about what bloggy influences we have from outside of the library world. I read a bunch of non-library blogs in the other areas I’m interested in. Being a distance learning librarian, of course I’m interested in education and educational technologies. I’m also really interested in knowledge management because I get wicked sick of how ineffective most organizations are at collecting organizational knowledge. I’m also interested in ideas about management, leadership and innovation because I’m interested in understanding what makes great organizations tick. And I want to be a great leader one day when I take over the world. 🙂
So to continue Rachel’s meme, here are five blogs outside of the library world that I read:
1. OLDaily — this blog by Stephen Downes is the spot for finding the best articles, surveys and blog posts on education and technology each week. I subscribe to a few other edublogs and would love to subscribe to more, but my head would probably explode if I did. I figure with a subscription to OLDaily, it’s highly unlikely that I will miss anything that terrific in other blogs — he always finds the most thought-provoking articles. To me, he’s like the Sarah Houghton-Jan of the online learning world.
2. Knowledge Jolt With Jack — one of my KM Blogs. A really great blog about knowledge management, collaboration, leadership, social networks and more by Jack Vinson. It makes me want to run out and get an MBA!
3. Lifehacker — I have probably learned more from Lifehacker than from anything else I have ever read online. From importing old e-mail into gmail to magnetizing a bic pen to learning the art of packing light, there is always some new and useful coming from Lifehacker into my Google Reader. It’s like Hints from Heloise for the techie set. 🙂
4. Creating Passionate Users — Kathy Sierra is like the smartest person in the universe. She has so many amazing insights into technology, human nature and business and she is not afraid to write things that may not be politic. Her post last year “I am not a woman blogger” came at just a time when I was feeling badly for thinking pretty much the same things. Thanks Kathy!
5. The Happiness Project — This is a blog chronicling an author’s year exploring ideas about happiness throughout history and trying out the many different ideas people have had about leading a happy life (she’s writing a book about it as well). I just find the different ideas about what makes people happy (gluttony versus self-control, rituals versus free-spiritedness, lots of possessions versus asceticism, etc.) very interesting. I’m a very happy person now, but I definitely was not always that way, and I sometimes wonder what it is about our lives that make us happy and how important some of those things really are (or aren’t) in the scheme of things. We so often get wrapped up in things that aren’t that important.
I read a lot of non-library blogs other than these, but I thought this was a pretty good sampling. 🙂 I think sometimes the best ideas that could be applied to libraries come from outside of the library world. Often, it takes a fresh perspective to see something that was right under our noses.
I’m going to tag Paul Pival, Janie Hermann, Steven Bell (or here, or here), Brian Matthews (and here), and Helene Blowers because I’m really curious about what blogs y’all read outside of our field. I want to know what inspires you. 🙂
Because the blogs for which I write don’t lend themselves to my taking up space for a personal post like this, I’m not blogging it. However, since you were curious about 5 non-library blogs follow (and I follow plenty more than 5 – especially in the fields of education and educational technology) I thought I’d provide them as a comment to your post. Here they are:
1. Nussbaum on Design – Nussbaum is an editor at BusinessWeek, and he blogs about a variety of design and innovation related topics. He has a great post this week on the backlash against design by designers. I follow about 10 other design/innovation oriented blogs.
2. Cool Tools is a popular blog (over 26,000 subscribers on bloglines) that discusses any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. It’s just amazing to discover how many interesting tools Kevin Kelly finds, and he basically just tells you if it is worth having.
3. Productivity 501 is a somewhat irregular blog but the author provides a number of good ideas to improve the quality of time management and personal productivity. Some people think I never sleep, but I get a lot done because I read blogs like this and learn how to be more organized and productive.
4. Sports Geezer is the perfect blog for aging jocks like me. In particular many years (like 45) of basketball have left me with little or no knee cartilege. So I find a lot of good tips and ideas for staying active and healthy while avoiding those things that cause further damage to aging body parts (fortunately the mind is no one of them). The author also has a knack for finding interesting sportsgear.
5. I might have offered up The Irascible Professor which is a fun read – a cynical look at higher education – but it’s really a more traditional newsletter with an RSS feed, so I’ll go with Tomorrow’s Professor Blogwhich is mostly a listing of interesting articles from the field of education – but not always – posted with some some brief introductory information. I’ve discovered some really interesting research papers here – including but not limited to some interesting future visions of higher education and teaching and learning.
I hope you (and your readers if they bother to look at the comments section to this post) found this of some interest.
Thanks for the link love, Meredith.
Thanks for posting this Steven. I actually don’t see this as a personal post at all, since I think it’s of practical use to see what blogs influence us from other fields. If people find a professionally useful blog post from what you wrote, I think it is very professionally relevant. I look forward to checking out your five. 🙂
I suppose what I mean is that it would seem out of place for me to one day post something like this on ACRLog because it’s not my blog – but rather a team blog with a specific focus. I would think it odd if Barbara Fister suddenly wrote a piece about her favorite blogs – and it had nothing to do with academic librarianship. Who knows – maybe it’s something to give a try sometime.
This idea of the importance of reading outside just library content is something I pointed to way back in my C&RL News article back in 2000 about Keeping Up – which is the first official item I published on the topic and which spurred me to develop the KU Site. But I emphasized the importance of keeping up with resources peripheral to librarianship – that’s where some of our best inspiration, ideation and innovation can come from. Extending this to the blogosphere is certainly coming more naturally to librarians because it is so much easier to find blogs that are “non-library” in nature.
Thanks for asking what I’m reading.