The challenge continues and more people have joined #blogeverydayofjune. Thirty at last count. This tweet pretty much sums up the feelings of those participating:

bonitoclub RT @nomesd Does anyone else find that all they’re doing now is reading blogs? #blogeverydayofjune <– yes, but it’s great fun!

Those of us participating in this challenge are not necessarily blogging on professional topics. Of those that aren’t – do you feel constrained in anyway not to speak out on professional topics? I am not saying that you should professionally blog- just wondering if perceptions of risk to career colour that choice. Of those that do post on professional topics- have you ever felt it threatened your career?

Of those taking part in the challenge most work in the information industry. Many of the blogs are personal in nature such as SkinniBitch who is sharing her weight loss journey and FromMelbin who has blogged about grief. There are those who started off with purely professional blogs like Creative Circ who says in her comment on Suelibrarian’s post:

I thought I would #blogeverydayinjune on professional topics, and have found it very exciting to be discussing circulation again. It’s not a hot topic with my peers : – ) However as I read everyone else’s topics I wanted to get more into my own thoughts and discussions.

Being a part of this challenge has made many question their digital identity and reputation management. As a blogger you may decide to have separate identities or not, the decision is yours and it will depend on many factors including your workplace social media policies (if they have one).  Whatever you decide authenticity and having your own voice is important.

However, from all the posts I have read over the last four days I can say the following:

1. The profession is full of many terrific, articulate and thoughtful writers.
2. People who work in libraries are a diverse bunch with many different passions – from  kitchen appliances to retro art/collecting.
3. Blogging for 30 days straight is a real challenge and;
4. Reading 30 blogs a day is time-consuming but fun!

Yes, this is the last Carnival of the Infosciences (COTI). Chadwick put out the call for a new COTI administrator and no one answered the call. And would-be hosters were scarce with several carnivals being rained out in recent times. Now is the time to say farewell. Libraries Interact is very chuffed to be hosting the last COTI. It deserved to go out with a bang, not a whimper. And it seemed like a nice event to celebrate Library and Information Week and Information Awareness month in Australia.

The founder of COTI, Greg Schwartz, started the carnival in 2005 and Chadwick Seagraves took over running it in 2006. Greg sent in a farewell ‘speech‘…

“As good an idea as the Carnival seemed at the time, it proved to be counter to the cultural norms of the library blogosphere. Librarians just didn’t embrace the idea of nominating one’s own work for inclusion. They aren’t self-promotional in that way. A heartfelt thanks to everyone who tried to make it work. It was a fun ride while it lasted and I hope at least a few people found value in it.” — Greg Schwartz

Chadwick was going to make a speech too, but it seems the lures of a holiday got the better of him. Look out for a comment perhaps after his vacation.

by rpongsaj (Creative Commons License: Attribution)

Curtain up …..

Security

First up, one from me.. Security is one of the themes of Information Awareness month, so this handy list of Firefox extensions designed to protect your privacy is worth a mention. iLibrarian has synthesized the quick list, 10 Firefox extensions to protect your privacy, from a much wordier post at Web Worker Daily.

Privacy

And Ken Varnum at RSS4Lib asks “will a photograph taken of someone without the subject’s knowledge, published to Flickr with a geotag, be considered evidence of that person’s whereabouts”. Geotagging Photos When You Take Them.

Metadata

David Bigwood sent in a post from Catalogablog about librarians becoming metadata standards advocates in their communities. As an example he says “If the local geneology society puts up a calendar on their website, help them get it into iCal or hCal format. Then we could drop their info into a pathfinder.” David would like to read your comments on this so get on over and comment on Metadata Advocates

I’m recommending a post by Neil Godfrey, Metalogger, Meta-reflections 4: team management issues. This is one in a series of reflections Neil is writing on his experiences with metadata and the Rubric project. This one focuses on team management issues, in the challenging scenario of a multi-institutional project. Not so much on metadata, but on critical success factors in a pioneering project.

Libraries & Collections

Neerav Bhatt submitted his post asking if Libraries are important from Rambling Thoughts. “Today the existence of libraries in our midst is so much taken for granted that their significance as living institutions is almost lost to us. Why are libraries important?” Check out Are Libraries Important and join in with the other commenters.

While we are on the importance of libraries, let’s expand that to the importance of librarians. Peter Binkley suggests Kathleen Seidel may be a librarian with ‘superpowers‘, going by his reference to a phone booth. At Quaedam Cuiusdam, in Stealth Librarian he outlines her research using her librarian superpowers to document the scientific case against the theory that preservatives in vaccines have caused the recent increase in diagnosed cases of autism.

From super librarians to nerdy chic librarians. Derek suggests that perhaps librarians should be embracing the nerd chic tag at Derek’s ALIA blog. It’s worth following the link to the newspaper article reviewing Andrew Finegan’s Library Idol show, too.

Another submission from me is by JBD over at Librarything blog. Two more legacies finished outlines what’s happening at Librarything with recently completed book collections of dead people. This is a good starting point to explore the “I see dead people['s books]” group.

Fiona Bradley submits a post from Cindi Trainor’s Citegeist. An Assessment of Next Generation Catalog Enhancements, Part I: The Model. Cindi outlines the model she used to assess catalogue enhancement options against her ‘best of the web’ which includes Amazon, Flickr, Wikipedia and Pandora (for Australian readers, that is not the NLA’s digital archive, but an internet radio site, that is not accessible to visitors from outside the United States. Check out Cindi’s post to find out about the sweet spot.

That wraps it up.. All you former carnies out there, leave a tribute to the COTI here.

So as the curtain closes… arrivederci, adios, farewell, adieu, good bye to the carnival.

Last year for Library and Information Week (LIW) we asked you for your visions of a library in 2010. You might like to revisit those posts to see what we were thinking a year ago…

This year we are going to celebrate by hosting a Carnival of the Infosciences. The carnival has not been held since February when A passion for ‘puters hosted the 89th. So, while you are celebrating LIW, keep a look out for blog posts to submit for the carnival roundup to be published on the 26th of May. This LIW is an Australian event, but submissions from all over are welcome. The theme of LIW is libraries are for everyone, so posts on that theme are particularly welcome.

If you have never participated in a Carnival of the Infosciences you can find out more from the infosciences wiki. Post your submissions to blogadmin <at> librariesinteract <dot> info and please include the following:

• The title of your entry.
• The URI (address) of your entry.
• A description or summary of the entry.
• Your name or other moniker by which you wish to be referenced.

Alternatively add them as links to del.icio.us with the tag carninfo and a description of your own and your name (or moniker) in the notes field.

Have a great week!

Image by busymommy Some rights reserved.

Recently, I mentioned that one of the nifty things you can do with Yahoo! Pipes is auto-translate blogs and I’ve talked a bit before about finding Japanese blogs. This is really handy if you want to subscribe to non-English blogs.

Not only will this give you a different perspective on the news we are all reading and commenting on, but it may also help you to stay in touch with developments that may not be covered in the English-language library world. It can work in reverse too, helping those in countries where English is not their first language and there are fewer local blogs to subscribe to the major English-language blogs.

Find new blogs

The first step is to find them. I discovered the following translations for our blog genre -

English – biblioblogger
French – biblioblogueur
German – biblioblogosphäre
Japanese – ﾌﾞﾛｸﾞ(図書館) blog library (library blogger)

Search for the translated word and you’ll find many blogs in each of these languages.

Yahoo! Pipes

Note: The next step is to either create or clone a pipe in Yahoo! Pipes. Working with Yahoo! Pipes can be a little bit technical, so you might feel more comfortable just subscribing to a translated feed that has already been created.

So, what exactly is Yahoo! Pipes? It’s basically a visual mashup generator, you put in RSS or other feeds, add images, translate, or other transformations, and it gives you a new feed at the end. It is extremely versatile and because it has a visual interface, and you can copy feeds (or Pipes) made by others, this makes it easy to start to use.

First steps

Take a look at a Pipe that I created to translate the Bibliobsession 2.0 blog from French to English. You’ll probably notice one thing right away, that the translation is not very good, but machine translation is generally problemmatic, especially when dealing with technical or specialised topics. However, if you click on each article, the translations are generally better.

You can either subscribe to the translated blog as is, or you can clone the Pipe to add subscriptions to other blogs, or choose other languages.

Modifying the Pipe

If you want to have a go at modifying the Pipe, choose clone. You can then edit the source to look at the parts that make up the translation. As you can see below, there’s not a lot to it. Feed goes in, gets mashed up a bit, translated, and comes out -

To make your own, either change the feed address to another blog, or try changing the selected languages.

And voilà, you have a translated feed. Have you used Yahoo! Pipes for an interesting project? Are there blogs you would like to see translated? Does anyone want to read this blog in another language? Tell us about it in the comments!