Wicked Cool

Don't Underline for Emphasis on the Web

When you're writing for the web, bold text and italicized text are the best ways to emphasize a few words at a time. Underlined text is associated with hyperlinks, and non-linked underlining creates unnecessary confusion when visitors encounter it on your website. Don't do this to your readers:

Big Announcement: Everyone needs to know about this very important announcement!

Is that a link on "Big Announcement"? The reader hovers over the words with the mouse, thinking, "I want to know more. Can I click here to get it?" Hmmm... no hand pointer... not clickable... It's definitely underlined, but it's not a link.

This only took a few seconds to figure out, but for a moment your reader was thinking more about the formatting than the message. Don't set your readers up for frustration. Reserve your use of underlining for hyperlinks, and remember that bold and italicized text are best for emphasizing your writing on the web.

"A few good blogs": how to find them on any subject

A person who asks really good questions recently asked me, on behalf of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum,  if there were a way to find weblogs written by Wisconsin soldiers and veterans. This is what I dug up - it was a good start for this particular question, but the sources used could help with any subject.

I started by re-reading something I'd bookmarked from Ask Metafilter: How to Find Great Blogs on Any Subject? The "MeFites" pointed me to Technorati, the blog search engine. I did a quick and dirty search for "military" and "wisconsin" which yielded some leads like In Iraq for 365, Boots and Sabers, and Dan's Ramblings.

As it turns out, I could have stopped there and skipped the next few searches. Bloglines, the news aggregator, gave somewhat more daunting results for just "military." I then continued to Blogshares, the "fantasy blog stock market." Blogshares categorizes blogs by industry, and in their military section, they listed thousands more. Globe of Blogs organizes blogs by author's location or subject, but again, the number of results was too large to be very useful. Google Blog Search would find specific posts, but it wasn't ideal for this.

Finally, I just Googled around on "military" and "blogs" and very soon found Miliblogging.com, "the world's largest index of military blogs." It offers advanced search by country (though not state), branch, gender and more. That looked most promising of all.

This had taken about 10 minutes, so I wrapped up by suggesting my "patron" look deeper into Miliblogging.com and find a few good blogs. Then, use those writers' "blogrolls" (and those of the three blogs I'd found using Technorati) to find more.

Blog searching is not cut-and-dried. It relies heavily on serendipity and demands some patience. But once you find one blog you like, and start reading it regularly, you'll grow to learn more about that particular corner of the blogosphere.

Share your favorite tips for finding blogs below!

What the heck is Carnival of the InfoSciences?

We all know there are hundreds (maybe thousands!) of library and library-ish websites and blogs out there. Who has time to sift through and find the very best bits? Nobody! Enter the Carnival. From the Carnival of the Infosciences wiki:

The Carnival of the Infosciences is a weekly weblog post that endeavors to showcase the best posts in the blogosphere about topics related to the wide world of Library and Information Science.

Carnivals are not unique to the "biblioblogosphere" (there are ones for food, law, you name it). Here are some recent highlights:

• on Reference: Reference in the Raw from Carnival #53
• on Programming: Wizard of Oz meets Pink Floyd from Carnival #51
• on Outreach and Technology: La Crosse Public Library goes 2.0 from Carnival #50
• on Reader's Advisory: Practicing Librarian's Book Reviews from Carnival #47

As you can see, the Carnival is a "traveling show," so It helps to keep an eye on the Carnival of the InfoSciences wiki. Step right up!

Some other blogs to check out

Okay, last week I promised to give you some other blogs you may want to read.
Actually, Mary Wepking, our CE coordinator, keeps up a nice list of "Library Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts" that you should check out for ideas -- http://www.scls.info/ce/libblogs.html

...and subscribing to any of them in Bloglines is very easy:

1.  Go to Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com)
2.  Log in, if you need to (see last week's post about how to create a bloglines account, if you don't have one)
3.  Click the "My Feeds" tab.
4.  Click the "Add" button.
5.  Put the URL for the blog's feed in the box.  (You can usually get the URL by right-clicking on the icon or link that says "RSS" or "XML" and copying the shortcut or link location.)
6.  Click "Subscribe"

That's it!  Now you'll have more to read in Bloglines than just Wicked Cool!