Blogrolls Revised

I’ve groomed and added to the Library-Flavored Blogroll and removed the News blogroll from this site. If you miss it, let me know, and if enough folks ask for it, when I do the MT 3.1d upgrade this weekend I’ll try to work it into the page. I felt the news blogroll detracted from the more interesting collection of librarian blogs. I frequently point to my blogroll when librarians ask me, “What’s a blogroll?” or “What can you do with a blog?” or even “What features does Bloglines offer?” Pushing the unique blogroll to the top made a little more sense.

For the library-flavored blogrolls, I don’t list just anyone… besides Steven and Michael and Jenny and Gary and Sarah and Dinah and… Seriously, I build this blogroll primarily from blogs I enjoy and find personally useful. Also, most of these blogs have a low hysteria level and a high fact-checking level (though a few of them have a bit of trigger-finger). A few are really just reference resources, and only made it to this list because the public librarian in me just can’t help it.

What the librarian-built blogs on this blogroll share is an informal and undwritten code of honor, in which we are collegial and good-humored even in debate and discussion. A couple of blogs I know of aren’t listed here because their authors chose to use their bully pulpits in the most literal sense, to heckle, berate, or scold. That’s completely unnecessary (and is also an example of how the wrong personality can misuse every new technology). I won’t give these blogs Google-juice, let alone the dignity of my stamp of approval, even if I read them just to see who’s in the stocks this week.

But–I must hasten to add–if you aren’t listed here, don’t assume that describes your blog! You know if you’re naughty or nice. (Generally, if you’re even thinking about the question, you’re probably nice, because mean people never see themselves that way.) I have another list of library blogs I track that just didn’t quite make it to this longer blogroll–or maybe I just keep meaning to get a round tuit, or maybe I saw it once and then lost the feed. You know how that goes.