Reaching beyond the biblioblogosphere

Walt Crawford's investigation of the biblioblogoshpere in this month's Cites & Insights has prompted a lot of buzz. Although I didn't have the negative reaction that Meredith did at Information Wants to Be Free, the questions she asks are my favorites to come out of the discussion:

Are we just preaching to the choir? How many people outside of the biblioblogosphere are reading our blogs? How many library directors, how many non-techie librarians, how many paraprofessionals are reading these blogs?

As she points out, the only way we will know, for sure, is to do a survey. Anyone looking for a research project? Publishing the results in a journal would, itself, promote the biblioblogosphere to the rest of the library profession.

Anecdotally, I know that there are some non-bloggers who read my blog because they send me email or mention it on the rare occasion. Mostly, these are people who I have met in real life or in a virtual classroom.

Here's another question that could be answered using the tools Walt used (but would require a lot more work): how far does the biblioblogoshpere reach out into the general blogosphere? In other words, what percentage of the 9430 links that Google finds to The Shifted Librarian are from library blogs and what percentage are from other blogs? This could, maybe, be a measure of how cool the image of the librarian is in the general blogosphere--which could, maybe, point toward a path that elevates the coolness factor of the librarian image more generally.

I was, by the way, not discouraged by the fact that my blog was well below the cut-off for 50-60 top biblioblogosphere blogs. I am gratified that my Bloglines subscriber number rises fairly consistently. I am thrilled whenever my Technorati or other ego feeds pull up a link to my blog, responding to something I wrote. Email responses are great, too (and I know I'll love comments which I will implement once I'm no longer using this blog as a professional portfolio to help me get a job). Those things are motivating. A measure of broad reach, even if it were done once a year, really wouldn't inspire my writing from day to day.     #

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