Early last fall, some months after going live with these pages, I was doing a bit of vanity-googling, to try and discern how I was progressing at enticing search engines to index the blog. In the course of those searches, I came across a paper entitled "Semantic Blogging and Bibliography Management" (Cayzer and Shabajee, 2003), which literally made me think about blogging in a whole different light.
The basic idea is that a weblog, with its structured, common elements like links, author and title, categories and tags, is an ideal medium for creating and sharing bibliographic information. (Demonstrator blog, normal and "record card" views).
I was simultaneously struck by two thoughts. One: that I had wasted a lot of time learning PHP and SQL, when all I needed was a LiveJournal account. And B: that in hammering together a backend, and filling up the bibliography, I had essentially created a blog. (Which, while comforting, more or less makes the blog somewhat superfluous.)
Then, along came Google Base which, I admit, I completely didn't get at the time. It was like staring at an atlatl, trying to deduce its purpose without the benefit of having seen some practiced Cro-Magnon chuck a lance at a mammoth. "You want me to put my data where?" Then I found The History Librarian's bibliography of Georgia labor history, and Chris Karr's collection of H.P. Lovecraft copyright research, and I totally got it. You don't use Google Base to create a bibliography. It is a bibliography. All you have to do is add to it.
Most recently in this same ilk (and via Librarian.net), there rises Casey Bisson's prototype library catalog, assembled out of WordPress' blogging platform and some nifty household appliances. (Holy Schnikes!) Jenny Levine has posted a nice summary of how the OPAC works at the ALA TechSource blog.
This sort of terrible vision — the ability to look at the same tools everyone else is using and invent new applications — is awfully humbling. I'm pounding rocks into crude wheels, and all I can think to do with them is squash pesky mice.
