Monitoring student blogs

Via Paul Pival, The Distant Librarian, Brian Mathews at Georgia Tech monitored student blogs on LiveJournal and Xanga and interspersed librarian-style advice in the conversations. Cool!

Brian had some negative reactions to using gt_library as his username, as if it were the institution hanging out on LJ. When he used his own individual persona for interactions, he got nothing but appreciation. His post on the project includes a link to his Institutional Repository entry (how cool is that?) that contains a pdf with preliminary findings and a Quicktime movie that was very helpful in helping me understand the concept.

How does this scale? I already monitor a group blog of WashU students on Live Journal. There's over 400 just in that group. Occasionally, I can offer a librarian perspective on the group blog but it's mostly used for event announcements. From Brian's paper it looks like I would be more effective monitoring their individual LJs. That's a lot of subscriptions to set up and a lot of feeds to monitor--although the search feed in Bloglines would definitely help.     #

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