Besides the excellent content, it’s fun reading Karen Schneider’s Free Range Librarian blog these days because she’s discovering the sense of community and the unexpected level of conversation you get when you blog with open comments. I say “unexpected” because you never expect anyone else to really care enough to take the time to enter a comment, and yet it turns out a lot of people care enough. I never, ever anticipated that side of it, and it’s become one of the things I really love about my blog. Trackback fills in a whole other side of the conversation, the cross-blog one.

And that’s what library organizations don’t get – conversation. That’s why ALA, LITA, ILA, and other major institutions don’t blog, certainly not with open comments. Even this seems beyond their reach right now. But that’s what we need to open up – a conversation with the outside world, as well as amongst ourselves.

Bonus FRL quote (emphasis is mine): “Donning my lii.org hat, we had a remarkable education when we added RSS feeds. Now people find us through the blog-finding agents. Librarians, including me, suck at marketing, but by adding RSS feeds, we stumbled onto a way for the audience to find us, instead of the glacially slow process of dissemination through our existing readership.”