Don't Ask Me To Censor Myself - It Makes Me Grumpy

It's a couple of days now since I got a comment on my work blog asking if I could put "UK ONLY" in the title of all of my posts. My first reaction to this was bemusement but the more I thought about it the more angry it made me. In effect, the commenter was asking me to censor my own content. To restrict the group of people who are able to gain value from the content I post. I hope that I've thought about it enough now to put together a rational post rather than a rant but I apologise if I do end up venting spleen!

The Boring Bit

First, a bit of background. My work blog is very specific. It's a summary of every book and journal that I buy for the library. The entries are tagged with subject, format, and location tags as well as some unique tags that allow me to feed the entries back to the library web page. At first, I was dubious that the blog would get any hits but it did start to get readers. Soon, folks started to comment on the books and putting links to allow readers to request books and journal articles from the blog entries has led to a steady flow of requests - which at the end of the day is what it's all about.

The company that I work for is large. In excess of 300,000 people around the globe. My library serves the UK but, due to licensing for e-resources and practical considerations for hard copy, we can only supply info to the UK. In light of this, the request to restrict blog entries to the UK may seem reasonable. Or does it? Why did it irk me so? And why will I not be putting off people who can't borrow my resources from reading about them?

Let Consumers Decide What is Useful

Well, even if people aren't able to access my resources it can still be helpful for them to know about them. The blog has had many comments from people all over the world who have asked for more information about how to access the resources. In some cases I've been able to put them in touch with local libraries. In others cases they've bought copies from Amazon. Whilst the aim of the blog is to increase local use of resources putting it on a global forum allows others to reuse and benefit from the information.

Unfettered User-Generated Content Is What It's All About

In a broader sense I think it's important for Web 2.0 content producers not to second guess who might derive value from that content. User generated content, for me, is what Web 2.0 is all about. In a sense, there's no such thing as bad content because what Web 2.0 gives us as consumers of information is the ability to select the information that's relevant to us and ignore the rest. It's up to the content users rather than the content producers to censor the information. If content producers start to censor or restrict access to their information the amount of information in the system is restricted and Web 2.0 starts to fall over. By all means use tagging to target your user group and help users to filter out your info if they don't need it, but don't put people off of reading your content.

I can see that to anyone used to a traditional way of working asking someone to restrict their readership geographically may seem reasonable but it seems that Web 2.0 has changed the game - allowing content producers to benefit users that were previously out of reach and consumers fine control over the information that they are exposed to. I, for one, will not be censoring my own content.

Xmas already?

No blogging so far this week as mega busy preparing for Xmas. Seems excessively early but going to Czech for a few days on Friday (woohoo!) so have to get as much sorted now as possible.

The new books blog at work has gone mental. Over 200 hits yesterday and over 300 today - the tagging seems to be doing it - about 20 hits a day come from that days post - the rest are all from old entries - mainly from feed readers. Just shows that the old days of folks regularly visiting websites are numbered - feed readers are in. Still haven't sent the chartership forms off - must do that before the end of Thursday but also have to put in my budget request for next year and finish some other things off as a priority. Hopefully I'll get some time to set up blogger over xmas break but it just seems non-stop at the moment. Work - Run - Eat Dinner - Wrap Presents - Sleep - Work... What day is it? Roll on Thursday.

Hecticness

One of those days today when you don't actually get around to finishing things... One of the first things was finding an email in the inbox from someone telling someone else that certain info is available in the library. I guess sometimes it is worth going to meetings as that's where I made it clear that the library had this info. Coincidentally, someone else on that project popped in later so it was lucky that I'd dug the info (old newsletters) out of the archive. I arranged to catalogue the newsletters and drop it off when they are done (if they are catalogued and issued they'll impact the monthly stats - I think it really is worth working for every issue). The parting shot was "I don't have to do anything do I, I don't do libraries". The answer was "No". People are too busy to deal with complicated procedures - I really beleive that you have to make borrowing items as easy as it can be - even if that means putting a bit of extra effort in. The moral of this was "There's something for everyone in the library - they just don't know it yet!".

The rest of the day was mostly about stats - the figures look good. Loans are up about 5-10% on last year so I really need to be shouting about this to turn it into benefit for the library. I also need to be shouting about the value that the library adds - if everyone who borrowed from the library this year bought their own copy then the cost would have been ten times as much. I'm collecting these little facts like a man obsessed at the moment - trying to mash them all into something I can sell to the bean counters!

Later in the day (after chasing a colleague for some stats) they let slip that they'd seen some photos from a recent library event. I hadn't seen them yet so that again was fortunate - more fodder for the folder...

Also did some professional reading today - learnt about a possible schism in Java that Google Android may cause and also a new release of Spring - this stuff is way down the line but it all builds to the background subject knowledge. It's slow going though - I think RSS is going to help. I'm a big fan of my newly found Google Reader and hopefully I can play around and get some uses of RSS for the library website - I know what I want to do but it's just about getting it there...

Also found Google Notebook today which is a cool little app - especially when working on more than one machine. I've been keeping it open today to add thoughts for blogging as I think of them...

Anyway - enough of this - time to "Go and do something less boring instead".