My colleague partner in crime friend and fellow blogger Kathryn Greenhill has just launched a new blog: Virtual librariesinteract.info (vlint for short). If you’ve been reading our lint blog, you will have noticed that a few of us have been exploring Second Life (see, for example: Christmas party!, and the news about our building in Second Life). Kathryn decided (and rightly so, I think) that it would be a good idea to hive off the majority of SL posts to a separate blog, and so, in her ’spare’ time has put installed and put together this blog for discussion and sharing information on Australian library folks’* adventures in SL.
As Kathryn points out on her blog, snail (fellow linter) made the brilliant suggestion that we could broaden it so that we’re not only blogging about Second Life: we can use vlint to blog about “any other world, including World of Warcraft, gaming, speculative fiction or virtual library branches. This is the place for the more specific and technical posts.”
Anyone want to blog about WoW, or EQ, and the impact of the gaming experience on library users’ expectations of library interfaces, perhaps? How about the different experiences of PvE and PvP players and their expectations when interacting with each other in-game and in Real Life… and in libraries? (Okay, I’m stretching it a bit here. But next time I log on I might have to analyse my reactions to finding information about a difficult quest, and observe how players ask for help or information…)
*library folks because I’m trying to be inclusive of all - librarians, library technicians, IT people - anyone who works in a library, really.
Was I worried about having to medicate Baubles the Cat? Giving Baubles her first quarter pill this morning was remarkably painfree. What I did was this:
- Chopped the big pink pill into quarters.
- Opened a little ‘tray’ of Baubles’s all-time favourite treat: Dine Seafood Selection in a Tuna Mornay. (She’d come running by now, as her sharp ears are tuned to the frequency of the sound of the pantry door opening.)
- Picked up a quarter of the pill and dipped it in the seafood selection. Did my best to get the pill slathered in the stuff.
- Handed it to Baubles, who proceeded to lick some of the stuff off the pill AND THEN SHE ATE THE PILL TOO.
- Did a Happy Dance all through the house and interrupted M in his shower to tell him the good news.
- As a reward I gave Baubles a couple of mouthfuls of the seafood selection, saving the rest to repeat the process this evening.
Every other time I’ve had to medicate Baubles in the past, we didn’t have Dine Seafood Selection in a Tuna Mornay to act as the pill dispenser (other cat food varieties have never been this effective before). Hopefully she doesn’t lose her fondness for the stuff over the next few days…
Blogging has definitely made me more conscious of my year - I can go back through my archives and see what I was thinking about on this day last year, for instance (I was writing about a game, surprise, surprise - and about M’s first unicycle!). I also maintain a paper diary, but for some reason I am less conscientious about the diary and sometimes forget to write in it for for days at a time. I do wonder though - will this blog still be findable/readable in 10, 20, 100 years’ time? Will my diary? (maybe it’s time to investigate inks with archival properties.)
I don’t know if blogs and diaries can ever record everything there is to know about a person, although anyone who has access to both my blog and my diary may have a slightly more complete picture of the sorts of things that interest me. No doubt they would have a field day analysing why I leave out certain things, or why I only write about certain other things…
At this time of year all the This-is-the-Year-that-was articles and posts start to appear. I enjoy reading them to see if I can remember all the events referred to. It usually amazes me how much I will have forgotten about over the intervening months.
“Who won this year’s Melbourne Cup?” (hmmm… do I even care?)
“The miners. Where were they trapped again? I can’t remember their names, either…” (Is this terrible of me??)
“There was an earthquake in Indonesia this year, wasn’t there?” (Yes - in Yogyakarta in May - I actually wrote this down in my diary!)
What sort of a picture would a researcher of the blogosphere have of the year 2006?
I wonder about all the stuff that goes unreported and unremarked…
