Top Link: Planet Cataloging

At the recent CHILL RSS CPD Event, I was asked by a participant "What blogs and feeds are out there specifically aimed at cataloguers and indexers?" I promised to send her my Bloglines links once my busy fortnight was over, so you can imagine my delight, fishing around for anything I'd missed, to come across Planet Cataloging, "an automatically-generated aggregation of blogs related to cataloging and metadata designed and maintained by Jennifer Lang and Kevin S. Clarke."

There are only two related drawbacks I can see in this excellent service:

1. As a reader, if I sign up for Planet Cataloging, I'm going to have duplicate feeds popping into my aggregator. If I sign up for, say, Catalogue & Index Blog and Planet Cataloging, I'm going to see C&I posts twice. I can skip over the C&I section of Planet Cataloging, or I can cancel my subscription to C&I Blog.
2. As a blog author, if my readers sign up for Planet Cataloging and cancel their subscriptions direct to "my" blog, how am I going to keep track of the number of readers I have? Working on the assumption that Planet Cataloging gets more readers than, say, C&I Blog alone, I'm delighted we're featured on Planet Cataloging - moreover as the UK Special Interest Group, there would be something wrong if we weren't featured. However, I'd like some stats information from Planet Cataloging's creators to help me in promoting my work and justifying (to myself and the CIG Committee) the time spent on writing for the blog.

There are also two caveats for blog readers:

1. Blog writers feed off each other - there's both dialogue and link-sharing going on. The latter may lead to duplication of intellectual content in Planet Cataloging. For example, because I've been mega-busy for two weeks, I've been silent and, this lazy Sunday afternoon, am catching up on my postings. Because I know some UK-based readers take only C&I Blog, and my responsibility is to CIG members first and foremost, I have no doubt that my belated link-sharing duplicates the content of other catalogue-bloggers. Of course, there's no difference between skipping duplicates on Planet Cataloging and doing the same thing in your own selection of links on Bloglines - it's just something to be aware of.
2. This is related to the first caveat. Because Planet Cataloging is aggregating everything, you get everything - the bits you want and the bits you want not so much. So, if you're in a niche area, you might be skim-reading a lot to get what you want - it's like a blunderbuss search compared to a search string on a specialist catalogue. Again, I don't see this as a big issue, but it's handy to remember it.

That said, I'm really pleased that (a) Planet Cataloging has come into being and (b) our feed's been selected for inclusion, and I'll be puffing it though all my professional chanels this week.

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