Tom Roper's Weblog

Blog status report

To avoid any confusion, this version of my blog will become the definitive one, but isn't yet. I was using iBlog and hosting my blog on my web site and am moving over to TypePad, but until I can fathom the Moveable Type Import Format, the version at http://www.roper.org.uk/blog/index.html is the authoritative one. In any case, if I can get the domain mapping feature to work, this shouldn't make any difference to anyone looking at this, but in the meantime go here for the full Roper blog experience

Observer on blogging

Today's Observer Review runs a piece, easily found in spite of the recent hideous redesign of that section, on blogging. There are several flaws in it which I'm sure have already been pointed out by others with quicker fingers than me. But for what its worth, here's my view:
1. Why concentrate on blogs that are essentially trivial? I would have expected the Observer to be aware of the political blog. And apart from the confessional and domestic, there are serious uses of blogging. It's puzzling that the author didn't turn to the Observer's sister paper, the Guardian, for help. The Guardian has a fine record of discussing blogging seriously.
2. Even so, accepting the criticism that many blogs are trivial and self-absorbed, it is a little rich for the Observer to describe them with such condescension. One only has to turn a page or two in the Review or other sections of the paper to discover a number of columns written by people who do not discuss the political, literary or artistic questions of the day, but write accounts of the tedium of their daily lives. Most of them write well and even amusingly sometimes, but are these anything more than bloggers using print and supported by the resources of a national Sunday newspaper?

Haptic Cow Simulator

I thought once more of my veterinary days (six years at the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons ) when I heard the story about pet vaccinations on the radio this morning. And then my eye was caught by this boon to bovines .

Solipsism gone mad

This blogging is a lonely art, and one that seems to me to be solipism gone mad

Why blog? The uses of blogging literacy

Having resisted blogging for a while, I suddenly find it interesting. There's no denying that it is unbelievably self-indulgent, and I probably have little of consequence to say to the world, but browsing the blogs that are identified as librarianly in places like Lisfeeds.com . I was struck by how few there actually are. And British librarians, with certain exceptions, seem to have been slow in getting blogging off the ground. That said, this blog is far from a professional tool and includes my musings on more or less everything that engages my interest for more than a few seconds. It will not replace a novel, an autobiography or the verse I attempt, though it may distract me from them, for which the literary world should be grateful. In any case, I'm still uncertain and unclear whether internet self-publication is a way forward for literature. If any of these works ever see the light of day then I think I still want to persuade a publisher and printer to fell a tree or two for their sake.
The obvious blog application for libraries though seem to me to lie in the area of current awareness services: blogging seems to me to take these to a stage where they can become far more useful for those who use our services. I'm developing a service for Brighton & Sussex Medical School and am wiritng the experience up for a couple of conference papers.