Thing 1: Blogging

Photo courtesy of Adventures in Librarianship

Defining a blog can be sort of tricky. Essentially, a blog (or a web log) is a collection of posts or stories organized in some order. The order could be chronological, alphabetical, categorical, or by some other method. For a more detailed description of blogs, see Wikipedia.

For this Thing 1, you should become familiar with the News section of the SLA TRAN website and Blogger.

To post something to the Transportation Division's blog, you need to create an account with the SLA Wikis. It's free! You only need to create your user account once to post to any of the SLA wikis.
To post a News item on the Transportation wiki:

1. Hover your cursor over the Add button on the upper right of the page and select News from the drop down menu.
2. Give your News item a title. Go for something catchy but also descriptive of your post.
3. Write the text of the post in the entry box. You can do with with the Rich Text/WYSIWYG editor or the Wiki Markup window. There is also a Preview tab to see how it will look.
4. Label your post! This is basically tagging it. What is it about? Are there any themes you want people to think of?
5. Click Save and you're done! It will show up in the News section.

Here is an introduction to Blogger that you should go through. To start a blog with Blogger, you'll need a Google account. (You will be using this account for some of the other Things.) If you have an account for other Google services, such as GMail, Google Docs, etc. To get started with Blogger:

1. Go to Blogger and sign in with your Google account.
2. Name your blog! You'll need to come up with a good name which will be part of your URL - yourblogsnamehere.blogspot.com. Write this down somewhere so you won't forget it.
   This is the point where you can pretty much set the tone of your blog. Is it going to be about libraries, transportation, or something fun?
3. Pick a template!
4. Start blogging! Write a post. How did it go? Did you have any troubles? Post about it here. Was it fun or in any way enjoyable? Did it feel like pulling teeth?

Now, a little bit more about tagging. Have you ever assigned subject headings to a book? Have you ever indexed something? That's essentially tagging, only more structured. In tagging you aren't necessarily bound to a controlled vocabulary, though you may certainly use one. Instead, you can use what ever tags you want, creating a folksonomy.

BONUS! Now that you're a blogger, because if you've done Thing 1 you really are, why not get into micro-blogging? Quickest way to do that is to sign up for Twitter. Twitter lets you make short (140 character) posts, and gives you a convenient platform for broadcasting what you're doing or something you find interesting, and follow others. For the Bonus Thing:

1. Create an account at Twitter
2. Add profile information including some sort of picture.
3. "Tweet" something. (The verb to post something to Twitter is "tweet".)
4. Find people you want to follow! This could be anybody - family, friends, colleagues, organizations, or celebrities. You might want to start with the SLA Twitter directory. (Then add yourself to it!)
5. Follow the Transportation Division's Twitter account! @SLATRAN. Once you follow @SLATRAN, you can post content to that account from yours by adding "#slatran" to one of your posts. Here is a video showing how to do it.