I have viewed blogs of friends and family members for some time now, but could not really see the value in spending time creating and maintaining my own blog. The blogs I have read sometimes have a theme, eg, philosophy, astronomy, but often they do not. The appeal they have had to me has been limited, I have to admit. I am not usually one to not venture into a new technology or use a new tool, but there has to be some benefit to me in spending the time and brainpower in getting the hang of it. MySpace always left me cold and I have now read, via links in the tutorial, that many bloggers feel this way. They give the reason that MySpace fails to connect people on a given topic sufficiently well. My opinion of much of the social networking tools around is that it does seem to often be for people with a lot of time on their hands, eg younger net-users, and people with overinflated senses of their own self importance. Given their was an estimated 6,679,532,264 people in the world as at 7 January 2008 (according to the World Population Clock http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html), the significance of one person's blog seems minimal. Especially when there is estimated to be between 65 million and 70 million blogs now in existence.
However, I am beginning to see the uses of blogs (it's early days though for me) from one point of view. It is a way of linking a very small group of users on one very particular topic. Those users might be separated by vast distances, differences in age, wealth, etc, but can converse or share on one single specific topic or thing. That could be useful. The other use I do see is that the one biggest failing of the Internet, particularly in previous years, is it's lack of LOCAL content. If a user wants to find out the name of an actor from an obscure film from the mid 1960s, or the distance between two galaxies, the internet is guaranteed to now supply this information somewhere, but finding useful information about your local community, especially very recent information is sometimes near impossible. This has improved more recently but I can see that blogs, and, in this case, library blogs could be really useful here. The key is keeping the information very recent and updated.
