On an unusually snowy March night I ventured out to take Laurie Foley’s free workshop called “Blogging- Who, What, Where & How?” at the brand new Toco Hill-Avis G. Williams library. The audience was small due to the weather and mostly women. (Two-thirds of bloggers are men.) We all wanted to know the same thing — how do I start a blog and more importantly how do I get readers?

Laurie Foley is an award-winning blogger and business coach.  She presented us with the history of blogging. Did you know that 133,000,000 blogs have been indexed since 2002 but ninety-five percent are abandoned within four months? 72% are hobbyists, 15% are part-times, 9% are self employed and 4% are professionals.  A great professional blog is Huffington Post and a good local one to check out (besides DCPLive) is Decatur Metro.

Then she recommended some good books: The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott; Wordpress for Dummies, 2nd Edition by Lisa Sabin-Wilson and Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (you can find all of these titles at DCPL).  Then she wowed us with the fact that 900,000 blog entries are posted every twenty-four hours. I must say I feel a little daunted but determined.

If you missed this class, don’t worry.  Every month the Library has many other computer classes which you can check out in our events calendar.

While the movie adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is not due to be released for another two months, there are plenty of Wild related things to keep our anticipation at bay and ensure that we will be ready to experience Spike Jonze’s movie to its fullest. If it has been awhile since you’ve read Sendak’s 1964 Caldecott winning book, you can check it out at the Library which has copies in English, Spanish and Chinese. If you haven’t seen the original movie trailer yet, which is pretty awesome, you can do so here.  And lucky us! A new trailer was released a couple of weeks ago, giving us a little bit more insight as to how they’ve taken a 10 sentence book and turned it into a feature-length film.

There are numerous people out there blogging about pretty much everything Wild related, but one of the coolest sites I’ve found is Terrible Yellow Eyes. The blogger was so inspired by Where the Wild Things Are that he set up a site that pays tribute to the book and its author. Artists from all over the world send in their own artistic reproductions of the book and the site is updated frequently.

The movie has been an enormous undertaking which has spanned many years and has involved hundreds of people. Check out Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are blog, We Love You So, to learn how the movie came to be.

And don’t forget to pre-order your Where the Wild Things Are figurines!

Do you have any fun Where the Wild Things Are sites to share?

Maybe it began with This Old House.  I remember when I was a kid, watching the show with my dad.  Norm and crew would take you step by painfully slow step through a kitchen renovation of an old house in New England, with the process often running to several episodes.  Later, I discovered a love/hate relationship with HGTV, where entire homes are magically transformed in two days or less.

Last year, I discovered the website Houseblogs.  I was fascinated.  I wanted a house blog!  I didn’t even have a house yet, but I started a generic house blog on Blogger, ready to document each step of the progress on our hypothetical house.  (I know others who have also fallen prey to putting the blog before the house.)  My husband and I finally bought an old bungalow, and as we began work on it, I got to work on the blog, personalizing it and even registering our own domain name.  My husband was pretty good-natured about it, except when I would snap photos of him climbing a ladder and temporarily blind him with the flash.

Originally, I planned the blog as a way for friends and family to keep up with our progress, but what I gradually discovered is that a) your friends and family don’t always care that you’ve just spent four weeks painting the trim on your house in original Craftsman colors, and b) a lot of strangers do seem to care, interestingly enough.  Wondering how to strip paint from your dining room molding?  A Google search will turn up at least one houseblog where someone has already done the hard work and figured out the best way.  We’ve even gotten several emails and comments from readers all over the country, sharing their experiences with us.

Here are a few of my favorite houseblogs (including a local one):

De-Victorianization on Division
House in Progress
Our Little Bungalow
Tiny Old House
Westview Bungalow

If you like the idea of reading someone else’s experiences transforming a house into a home, but aren’t into blogs, here are a few great books:

All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling Down House by David Giffels
The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca by Tahir Shah
Castles in the Air by Judy Corbett
Renovations : a Father and Son Rebuild a House and Rediscover Each Other by John Marchese
Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayer
A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle

If you’re a regular DCPLive reader, you probably know that we normally post Monday through Thursday, with a different blogger posting each day.  We’ve recently decided to make a few changes, which we hope will bring a little more variety and interest to the blog.

We’ll be welcoming two new bloggers to our team, and starting an alternating schedule.  We’ll have six bloggers and they’ll post every other week on a Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday schedule.  So if you’re used to reading Ginny’s posts on Wednesdays about kids’ books, for example, look for her posts now to appear  every other Thursday.  We also hope to add blogger bios soon, so you can learn a little more about our team!

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to let us know!

Do randomly placed apostrophes get under your skin?  Does it drive you crazy when someone uses a word that’s not really a word?  Would the phrase All “Natural” on a sign make you a bit uncertain?  If so, then check out the following blogs.  They’re a great place to commiserate with others for grammar transgressions–and you can even send in your own bad grammar finds!

• The Grammar Vandal
• Grammar Blog
• Red Pen Brigade
• Apostrophe Abuse
• The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

If you’d like some tips on improving your grammar, check out Doc Durden’s Guide to Good Grammar, About.com’s Grammar & Composition Archive, or go straight to the Grammar Girl herself.

I have been seeing pictures of “to be read” stacks popping up around the blogosphere, which totally fascinates me.  I have decided to join in the fun of sharing. Since I am an avid library user (as well as employee), my stack is all library books.  I also included all the other stuff that I have checked out for full disclosure.  Behold all that’s checked out on my library card!  

So, what’s on your card?

George Orwell has a blog!  The Orwell Prize, which is a British prize rewarding political writing, is publishing Orwell’s diaries online seventy years to the day later. With the initial post on August 9^th, Orwell writes of his daily life, such as picking blackberries.  And, his political musings will be posted starting on September 7^th.

If you like his blog, be sure to check out:

• 1984
• Animal farm
• Down and out in Paris and London

As February 29 nears and the national celebration of Black History Month ends, I feel it only fitting to dedicate this blog post to the power of words from our ancestors, parents and world leaders.  After reading please share with us your favorite quote!

May the following quotes and the input from DeKalb Library users words live from generation to generation.

“Until the lion has his or her own storyteller, the hunter will always have the best part of the story.”
-Ewe-mina

“The (word) of a friend makes you cry; the (word) of an enemy makes you laugh.”
-Tuareg

“Patience can cook a stone”
-Fulfulde

“If you educate a man you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman you educate a family (nation).”
- Fanti

“If you understand the beginning well, the end will not trouble you.”
-Ashanti

“Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”
-Maya Angelou

“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
-Martin Luther King Jr.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.”
-Frederick Douglass

I stumbled upon blackpast.org the other day and found it to be a very useful resource.  In their own words:

“This site is dedicated to providing reference materials to the general
public on six centuries of African American history. It includes an
online encyclopedia of hundreds of famous and lesser known figures in
African America, full text primary documents and major speeches of
black activists and leaders from the 18th Century to the present. There
are also links to hundreds of websites that address the history of
African Americans including major black museums and archival research
centers in the United States and Canada.”

For many more African-American resources and websites, see this post.

What is a blog?

I didn’t really know what a blog was
until we began creating one for DCPL. Our director talked about what a blog is
in our first blog entry.  Since first hearing about
blogs, I have been doing some exploring and experimenting with them. There are
several sites that allow you to create your own blog for free. Some of the most
popular sites are blogger,  wordpress, and livejournal.  I
currently write two blogs for my own personal enjoyment. One is a way to share
my life with my distant family and friends. The second is documenting my family
stories that have been passed down from generation to generation. You can add
pictures and videos to share with your audience. This allows many family members
to feel like they are participating in your life in a more dynamic way. If you
are interested in learning how to blog, the library has several books. Here is
a sampling: Blogging for Dummies, The Corporate Blogging Book, and We blog: publishing online with weblogs.

I have started finding blogs out there to keep up with the library
profession and other types of blogs to help me perform my current job better. I
found many of my first blogs by word of mouth and then most bloggers will list
their favorite blogs on their sites. Recently, I have been using an online tool
called bloglines.com to keep up with the numerous blogs I am interested in. This
site allows you to catch new blog entries without typing the address of each
blog. The site also allows you to search for other blogs using keywords.  So if
you are interested in blogs concerning Atlanta you can search for either entries about Atlanta or blogs with a direct focus on Atlanta..
Some of my favorite library related blogs are Librarycrunch, David Lee King, and Tame The Web.  Other blogs that I
check out frequently are Coaching Tip: The Leadership blog, The Practice of Leadership, and Metroblogging Atlanta.

Are you blogging? What are some of your favorite blogs (beside DCPLive of
course!)?