[WEB4LIB] FW: LJ: ALA Prez-Elect Gorman on the "Blog People"

[Bollinger,Stephen]

Just a little humor to temper the (deservedly) righteous indignation over this, I found the following snippet in the Slashdot comments regarding our dear president-elect:

"I think what he _actually_ meant to say was something along the lines of:

    'A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable -- except for ALA literary award winners such as Orson Scott Card [ornery.org] or Neil Gaiman [neilgaiman.com] or Sherwood Smith [livejournal.com] or David Brin [blogspot.com] or Jane Yolen [janeyolen.com] or Dianne Duane [blogspot.com] or, oh, bugger, you know, all those other ALA award-winning authors who also blog, not that I want to imply that ALA award-winning librarians who blog, like Kathleen de la Peña McCook [blogspot.com], are bad either, and oh, yeah, I definitely don't want to seem to be criticizing PLABlog [plablog.org], the brand new blog of the Public Library Association [pla.org], especially not when we put out a nifty little press release [ala.org] crowing about it, just last month, because that would look pretty stupid, now, wouldn't it -- er, um, what was I saying, again?'"

-Ray Raedlin in http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=140584&cid=11775329

Yours,
-Steve

Stephen Bollinger
Internet Specialist
CAPITAL AREA DISTRICT LIBRARY
401 South Capitol Avenue
Lansing, MI  48901-7919
http://www.cadl.org/

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org]On Behalf Of K.G. Schneider
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 6:40 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] FW: LJ: ALA Prez-Elect Gorman on the "Blog People" 


(Note: based on the December traffic, I think most of the discussion
actually happened on Web4Lib, not blogs.)

http://tinyurl.com/5ujgt

In which we learn, in a response to blog entries critiquing Gorman's
December 2004 L.A. Times article about Google Print, that the library
blogging community is uneducated, fanatical, and obtuse. "[The] Blog People
(or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of
information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of
digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do
not share that belief. ..." 

"Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that
many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex
texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an
accumulation of random facts and paragraphs. ..."

Nice. Really nice. Good use of the ALA presidential bully pulpit. No
citations, of course. 


K.G. Schneider
kgs at bluehighways.com