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. 🙂