Quick post before I go scrub the tub (no, not a euphemism ... just a household chore) ...

The Community Engine Blog has an interesting post talking about distributed blogging and how to adequately capture the zeitgeist of a community. He mentions that while some commercial aggregators are out there, they can't really do what's necessary to keep the community alive and kicking ...

His thought is that :

"... zeitgeist as captured by near real-time blog aggregation is insufficient to sustain decentralized communities for the long term. For that, these communities need archives.

Archives crystallize what such communities found important over time and ultimately define the community."

So, as I read this, I thought archives ... hmmmm ... a of of people (except archivists and librarians) confuse or combine the two ... Bud's a smart guy, so he's probably not confusing them, but when you look at the role of the library in an organization (or community) it is to provide for the information needs of users ... we commonly collect and aggregate stuff ...

So we should be the entities that perform the crystallization (or at least one of the partners) ... librarians should absolutely collect, aggregate, encourage, and in other ways enable the creation of community blogs ... and they should also contribute too -- that's the part we too often forget!

Of course, the next piece after all of the aggreagtion and crystallization is to turn it into real action ... real good for real people ...

Thanks Bud!

Off to the bathroom!