5 years

Today in the LSW Meebo room, Steve and Laura were talking about birthdays and Steve mentioned his blog was turning 3 this month. It made me remember I had started this blog sometime in August, so I went back and looked it up. Yep, Monday, August 11, 2003. This blog turned five, this past Monday, August 11, 2008. Not as ancient as Librarian.net or Whatever, but pretty darn old in terms of blog lifetimes.

In addition to this website being 5 years old, so is my LIS degree. In the mail today, I received a survey from my alma mater sent out to everyone who graduated in 2003 asking about the perceived value of their degrees. As if I needed yet another reminder of how quickly the time is passing. Five years tends to be a magic cut off in libraryland. If you've been working fairly steadily since you got your degree, you're probably over-qualified for many entry level positions, but if you're like me, you may not have the supervisory experience needed to move up in the ranks. Five years flies by like you wouldn't believe, and while you may expect to have some supervisory responsibilities by this point, it's not likely unless you've done some job hopping or you got really lucky (if supervising is what you want to do). This has an impact on my career planning, and the five years of experience and what that experience is in is a major cog in any plans for my future.

I've been thinking about the last five years a lot lately. Much of it in reference to this blog being for and about issues relating to young librarians. After five years in the field, I no longer feel all that "young". I've barely kept this blog updated for the last two years, and I think that's even more indicative of me no longer feeling that young.

I've been on the fence about retiring both the YL blog and YL site. Part of it is that I've built up a professional identity using "younglibrarian" on Gmail, Twitter, FriendFeed and a number of other services so I'm not ready to give up the moniker. The other part of me knows that I'm no longer contributing much to the original mission of the blog and site. I have other outlets where I let my creative energy fly free and I'd rather post in those venues.

What it comes down to is I'm recognizing that I'm in a period of professional maturation, and this part of my life may need to be placed on indefinite hiatus.

One way to drive traffic to your blog

Good thing I sent my "Open letter to incoming LIS students" to Carnival of the Infosciences for inclusion back in August. Chadwick put out a call for hosts for next week on Twitter, and I answered the call. Next Monday, October 29th, I'll be hosting issue #82. If you'd like to submit something (and please do!!), follow the directions on the Submissions Guidelines by 6pm CDT next Sunday, October 28th. Anything submitted after that will be held for the next host to consider.

If you are interested in hosting, follow the Hosting Guidelines. Chadwick's still in need of hosts for the rest of this year's schedule. If you're new to liblogging and want to build an audience, or if you've taken a bit of break and need some easy content, consider signing up. I know Chadwick will appreciate it!!

Non-liblog reading meme

Despite being a long time blog writer, I'm not that much of a blog reader. That is, if you discount my friends' personal blogs, which I will here. About the only non-libraryland blog I read on a regular basis, and actually read rather than skim, is Smart Bitches, Trashy Books: Come for the Man Titty and stay for the Cover Snark (tm). Romance genre world oriented, they aren't mean just to be mean, but they don't pull their punches either. Not everyone's going to appreciate them, but the discussions in their comments section rarely devolve into flamewars.

My life in 2.0

Discussion about 2.0, web, libraries, life, what have you, has been happening for a while. Maybe because I've been plugged in more often for the last month than I have been previously, but it seems like the frequency of discussion has spiked in the last month or so. I thought it would do me some good to practice some self-reflection on the topic. I'm not going to hit on every 2.0 app out there because I don't know about all of them as there seems to be a new one popping up every day. It's also hard to separate out sites into categories after a while because the majority of them use similar features. Anyway, here's my shortlist.

Blogs
I'm scared to count up how many blogs I contribute to, let alone am considered a member of. I started my first blog about four years ago. It's long dead, but it led to this one. Contributing to blogs helped me to hone my writing skills and build my presence on the web. I currently use Blogger, LiveJournal and Vox for somewhat regularly updated blogs, all with different purposes.

Wikis
It took me a while to see the value in wikis. I now use Wikipedia as a starting point in personal research like how many soldiers comprise a legion. I've contributed a little to a few other wiki projects. This is a service that I can see the value of, but rarely have the proper context in which to use it.

Social networking sites
I could almost do a whole essay on the use of social networking sites alone. Here are the networks that I have accounts with, even if I don't use the accounts:

MySpace
Friendster
Ning - Library 2.0, Library Bloggers

The only one that I'm particularly interested in at this point, because I actually understand the use of it, is Ning.

Tagging
I never got on the del.icio.us bandwagon, once again because I couldn't figure out the usefulness of it to myself. However, I'm a big user of LibraryThing. I got a paid account back when $10 got you a lifetime account. I have a secondary, private account, for a project I'm a member of and man, is it easy for managing my part of that project. See, I found the use for myself.

Photo sharing
I've had a Flickr account for about a year and a half now, and when I remember to upload pictures to it, I really like it. This is one of the services that I wasn't quite sure where to put it though because it's more than the tagging feature, and it's not quite blogging.

Instant Messaging
Is IM really 2.0? It's hard to think of it as being a 2.0 app, mainly because I equate 2.0 services as being available only after I left college (1999), and I was using IM well before I graduated. However, if the IM aggregators like Meebo are to be 2.0 apps, then yes, I'm a Meebo user when I remember to use it. It's only been recently that I've returned to regular IM usage. Why? Because I had AOL on all the time when dial-up was my connection to the internet. When broadband became my mode of connection, my computer was not robust enough to handle multiple programs with any efficiency and IM fell by the wayside. At home I still forget to turn it on, but on my work computer, AIM and Y!M turn on when the computer turns on.

Conclusion
Notice how many services I didn't mention, like the 2.0 app du jour, Twitter? I'm glad there are others out there experimenting with it because it's a service that I just can't see the usefulness of for myself. And I think that's the whole point of 2.0. What do you have a use for? If you can't see how a service relates to, or joy of joys, eases your life, you're not going to use it. This is why I'm a secondary adopter. I love new techie toys (I'm often teased by my siblings for being the uber-geek of the family), but I need to have a use for them or they get tossed by the wayside fairly quickly. Like I said, I was quick to hop onto the LT bandwagon, however, as my cousin and brother will be happy to attest to after helping me move, I own way too many books.

Edit:
Yeah...Forgot about the YouTube thing. So, I guess the header for where Flickr is should be Media sharing. And, I'm adding the tags I forgot.