This is Circulating Ideas, I’m Steve Thomas. My guest today is David Lee King. He’s the digital services director of the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library, and he’s got a new book out called Face 2 Face, using Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools to create great customer connections. You can find his blog at DavidLeeKing.com, or you can follow him on Twitter @DavidLeeKing.
David Lee King, thank you for being on the show today.
Yeah, no problem, should be fun.
I wanted to start off with something I saw on your About page, about on your web page, your website, and you said that people have told you on occasions that you play too loud, is that like just from your music, or is that in general?
[laughs] Yeah, that’s from music, I’m a drummer, I played drums since 6th grade, so sometimes where I play they’ll say, “quiet it down a little bit.” Cause I’m a bit deaf, so.
Drumming for years will do that to you. [laughs]
Once in a while, but I enjoy it.
You just came back from the Internet Librarian Conference, and one of the questions I was gonna ask you as a first silly question, was do you think they could have thought of an even longer hashtag to have on Twitter?
Gosh, yeah I don’t know why they just don’t use IL2012, or IL12, I’m sure there’s others like that, but we all know what it is.
We would’ve figured it out.
Whatever, it works.
It sounded like you had a good time?
Yes, I did, it was, I, Information Today puts on some really good conferences, I enjoy both of them that I go to, they’re good stuff.
What would you say is your favorite conference to attend, as an attendee?
Honestly, probably Internet Librarian right now, both Computers in Libraries and Internet Librarian and they’re both sort of the same type of conference, you get different crowds, but so it’s highly focused on librarian, techie, geek type stuff which I enjoy, and it’s in Monterey, so. Can’t beat that.
Do you get to do much as an attendee at conferences, or are you usually presenting quite a bit?
Sometimes. This year at Internet Librarian I only had one thing to do, well, one presentation and then I had a book signing for my new book, so it was pretty light, so the rest of the time I could just attend, which was actually pretty nice, cause I’m usually doing quite a few things.
I saw you blogged quite a bit of the sessions you attended, was there any specific session that stands out as being something that you really learned something new from, or more than one?
Actually, the very last session, which I blogged about that I believe, it was a closing keynote session, it was on sort of the future of libraries, and what a bunch of really innovative libraries globally are doing, and it was just basically a presentation that was completely full of really cool ideas to make your library hipper than it is now.
Were there things that you brought back that you think you’re gonna try to implement into your library, or you’d like to suggest?
Oh, probably, I’ll have to figure, I’ll need to look back through my own notes, [laughs] actually. But nah, there were just a lot of good ideas. I guess one of them, so one of them that I can think of right now, was this, one library, they wanted to have lots of really good, fun gaming computers in their youth services area, so instead of getting desktop computers, they just got iPads, and a little kiosk and beanbag chairs, and ta-da, all the kids suddenly have these wonderful gaming devices and they’re happy.
That’s really cool.
Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool, it’s pretty innovative, it’s a huge space saver too.
And it sounded like, not just from what you wrote, but from what I, trying to follow it on Twitter, on various other blogs, that the opening keynote was a little more divisive of, it seemed to agree with Roy, but seemed to be such an agreement with the other speaker, Steve, what’s his name, Coffman.
[laughs] Ah what’s his, yeah, right. Yeah, actually my boss asked me about that, he was like, David, what’s going on? Cause I sent out a tweet, and I was called on the floor on it, I had to explain myself, which was fun and fine, cause I really didn’t agree with anything, that Steve Coffman said.
What was he saying that you didn’t agree with?
Well, this is my take, I’ll say, to me he sounded like he was basically saying what LSSI does, without mentioning his company. Which to me, is often times downsizing libraries, making them more about browsing a book collection, sort of the library of the 80s, and that’s, look through my notes, that’s basically what he was talking about, he was saying, people are still buying print books, they’re selling like never before, so focus on the thing that people think of you as, and don’t worry about that social media, Internet web computer type stuff, because it will sort itself out, and I really didn’t agree with that, because you know, that’s when I stood up and made my comment, I said something to the effect of, that’s sort of like if you were in the 70s, and you were IBM and you said, well let’s continue to focus on making typewriters, because people are still buying them, and forget about that computer thing because it’s a fad.
Like the stereotypical buggy whip salesmen at the beginning of the 20th century.
Yeah, exactly.
“What’s wrong with horses??”
Right, there’s nothing wrong with print books, they’re awesome, I have a lot of them, I wrote one, but I don’t think that’s the sole focus of a library anymore. At all, it’s just one of many, you know.
Right, it’s even more that we’re diversifying, I mean I people like that always seem to act like we’re throwing the book into a big bonfire and moving on to just e-books, just technology, just creation, but it’s more, it’s another part of what we’re doing.
Yeah, and that’s my view of the company that that guy works at, that could be completely wrong, I really don’t know a whole lot about them, but when I read about them, that’s what they sort of sounds like what they’re doing, and I think that’s the wrong approach to a library. And it’s not fair to your customers, but again, that’s just me.
And he was paired up with Roy Tennant, do you know, were their presentations complimentary at all? Or, I wonder why, I couldn’t see why they were put together.
Yeah, no, I think they were both sort of billed as futurists, Roy certainly is, and he said what you’d expect Roy to say, the other guy, I guess he wrote an article, his article is basically what, I guess his presentation was about, so I think they were both being futurists, but in a different way. [laughs]
They see two different futures. [laughs]
Yeah. Or maybe one was bad cop and one was good cop, I’m not sure what was going on there. They seemed to like each other, they seemed to know each other.
Well, that’s good.
Yeah, but you know when you’re at a conference, you get plenty of different views, it’s actually sort of interesting.
It’s interesting to hear that point of view, cause there are people out there who believe in that, so it’s good to know.
Well, and it certainly got the crowd riled up and made them, if nothing else, Steve made them think, the people that were there, because it’s one thing to say, no he’s wrong, but what everybody needs to do is sit back and think, “Why is he wrong and how can I fix, what’s bugging me and how can I make that better?” Instead of just getting all riled up and saying, “No you’re wrong.” Cause that doesn’t help anything.
One of the things that your library has done, you all did the e-books for Libraries campaign, can you talk about that a little bit?
Yeah sure, um, and I’ll share something else that we’re going to be doing soon. Okay so, you talked to Gina before on your podcast, she tends to be one of those forward thinking library directors, which I think is awesome, we had a group, a small group of our mostly managers, some public service staff, that were meeting and thinking about how can we affect change in the e-book marketplace, and so we thought, well, and that was around the time, Sarah Houghton, Librarian in Black was doing her video rants, and some other libraries were boycotting things, all those were fine activities but we thought they were a bit negative, you know, just saying we don’t like you so we’re not gonna buy anything anymore, and go away, and calling them bad names, and depending on what you were reading, you know, I mean.
And that’s why we love Sarah though.
Yeah well Sarah, she did a great job, and said what was on her mind, and I completely respect her for that, she was fine, you know, honestly I thought her stuff was okay, I wasn’t so fond of the boycotting things, that’s the wrong way to go about it, that basically says, “please don’t give me a chair at your table. Cause I want to go away,” and I think that’s the wrong approach, whereas at least Sarah was saying, hey guys, that’s wrong, but so we thought, how can we be a bit more positive, but still do something, that gets noticed, so we created a petition site, ebooksforlibraries.com. And you can go there and sign our petition, our digital petition, and when we got ten thousand signatures, we were basically going to print out all the signatures on a huge roll of paper, which we did, we made like three videos through the process, it was a good, a hundred foot long roll of really large paper, and we printed it out six times, and mailed it to all six publishers. All those ten thousand names in pretty large font, saying, hey we want books in the format we want it in, because we’re the readers, basically, saying why can’t e-books have libraries, basically. So that’s what we did with that, we got a pretty good response, I think in about six weeks or so we got our ten thousand signatures, which is good, and we mailed it on, and I think one of the six publishers contacted Gina back and had a conversation with her.
And of course now there’s only five publishers.
We were mostly ignored by the publishers. Yeah right, right, five and a half, random penguin, I’m not sure about that. But so then, now we’re thinking we want to sort of phase two for our e-books for Libraries project, we’ve noticed that there are quite a few really good blogs out there that are focusing on e-books, there’s the No Shelf Required blog, there’s Library Journal’s got something going, there’s some other ones that are really good, none of them really bring those conversations back to a public library setting, and then say well what can you do about this, and how does this affect you? They just sort of more report the news,
Right, right.
And we were thinking it would be really useful to start that part of the conversation, since nobody else is doing it. So we thought maybe we’ll do that, so we’re gonna turn the e-books for Libraries thing into a blog, that’s focused on e-books, and then answer those, how does this affect us questions too, the Random House Penguin merger, maybe we’ll talk about that, and then say well how does that affect libraries and e-books, and then answer that question.
Are they gonna do what Random does, are they gonna do what Penguin does, or some combination?
Exactly, exactly, or when Random House says, oh you own those e-books, taking that back and saying, okay, so you’re an average public library, how does that change what you do? It doesn’t. Just because some vice president says something doesn’t mean you can go into overdrive tomorrow and go, I want to download all my e-books, and keep them on a server, you can’t do that. So yay. Yay for them saying that, but that really didn’t change a thing.
Right, when we say own, we don’t really mean own.
Right, not in the way I think of.
Another thing that you’re working on, you’re on the board for Library Renewal as well? Can you talk about anything that they’re doing right now?
Yeah a little bit, we’ve got some evil plans. So, Library Renewal, Libraryrenewal.org is sort of a non-profit e-book advocacy group, and we have some, so we try to educate, libraries and librarians about the e-book marketplace that’s out there right now, and then eventually, we want to try to build something that you know, helps libraries actually get e-books and publishers sell e-books to libraries in a much more transparent way that’s happening right now, I can’t say a whole lot about that, cause we’re still trying to develop our plans, but that’s sort of where we’re going right now, we want to make a big splash. Do something good for libraries.
You actually wrote about this yesterday, and I was actually gonna ask you about it anyway, but there’s the new Pew study that came out about customers don’t even realize we have e-books, so that’s kind of a problem.
Yeah it is, and that’s the same problem libraries have always had and five, ten years ago, was nobody knows we have databases, they still don’t, but those are a bit more irrelevant now, honestly, because ready reference is sort of dead, but yeah, that’s a pretty big problem and that’s something we can change, I would think. So yeah, that’s why I wrote my blog post, cause I saw that, I’d seen it before and I was wanting to write about it, but I got busy doing other stuff, and then thought, oh that would just be mean telling everybody they’re not doing a good job of marketing their stuff. But it came up again, I was like, well, that’s an easy blog post, and it’s true. Hello! yeah, nobody’s using your e-book collection, cause you’re not telling anybody you have it.
Right and I mean you, and you wrote about it in a constructive way like, here are some ways that you can promote it, and.
Well I generally try to be constructive. As I’m writing it, I’m like, we’re all idiots, cause we haven’t shared that with people, how can we make that better. Cause that’s something we can change.
Well, one of your, actually the head of Library Renewal is Michael Porter, and you’ve worked with him quite a bit, you all worked together in libraries,
Yes. Yeah.
And you did the 101 video and several other videos in the past, what is it you like about working with Michael?
[laughs] He’s a really good friend, I would say, he’s like my brother, almost. We just really click, we have, we certainly have a lot of different ideas, but we bounce ideas off of each other really well, and we just work really well together. So it’s fun, getting two highly creative people that like each other in the same room can, can be a good thing.
Right, and especially, and you guys some of your videos tend to get kind of silly sometimes, and you seem to have the same sense of humor I guess?
Yeah, I think we do. We like to have fun too, and just sort of, sometimes, do things, shocking in a fun way, I guess, just to show you, show the industry that you can have fun at your job, and still do big things. Like our Library 101 video, it actually got a bit of, I mean a lot of people loved it, some people really not so much, also, it got some, quite a bit of criticism, which is fine, I could care less about that, cause Michael and I had a good time, but it made a splash, and that’s sort of what we were showing through that process, I mean honestly we were also just, hey, let’s see if we can learn all this video equipment, and make a cool video too, that was one of our goals. Which we succeeded in that I think. But the other goal was to show you can market stuff, you can promote things, so it sort of goes back to that promoting e-books that libraries aren’t doing right now, you know, this is a way to promote stuff, yeah don’t be Michael and David and be silly and make a video singing about e-books, but if they can do this, if they can go that far out, you guys can certainly make some signs in your building, and maybe get on your local TV station and say, hey, we’ve got e-books, come check them out now. Right, an over the top example.
You’ve done a lot of video stuff, what do you think it is about video that’s a powerful tool that you can use?
Well, with video you can share a story, and you can watch and hear it, I think, that’s the difference, you know, most of us librarians tend to be text-focused, but I think most of the rest of the world is more visual and auditory focused, hence, that’s why TV is so completely popular, and that’s why YouTube is so completely popular right now, because people like to click and watch stuff, especially if it’s short, and YouTube is a pretty unique tool that allows you really easily to share that, you know, any more it’s as simple as whipping out your iPhone, or your point and shoot camera, pointing it at your head and talking for a minute, about something you’re interested in, and just the fact that you can immediately upload that to YouTube, share it out and have 100 people watch it, is amazing.
Because you know, that’s small as far as YouTube numbers, but if you think about your library director sharing something in her community or his community, that would be a good crowd. Right, and that’s just an amazing tool that we have. Especially if you use it well.
Any tool not used correctly will not be. [laughs]
Right, right. Something you have to learn and figure out. And YouTube actually has a, they have a really handy, sort of a best practices, white paper that’s really cool, I read about it last year sometime, but it’s got a lot of helpful hints, because YouTube sort of knows what works with videos, and what doesn’t at this point, and it’s really interesting, they talk about when libraries make their first videos, they tend to have a music bed at the beginning, titles slide go by, and lots of fade ins and the credits, and then they slowly work up to their point, by that time most people have clicked one of those related videos. They’re like, I’m out of here. And YouTube says your first 15 seconds are the most important things, that’s the most important part of your video so just start, it’s sort of like that inverted pyramid writing style that journalists use,
Right, right, right.
You stuff the most important part up front, so just start sharing, that would be better. And they have a lot more pointers like that, but it really makes you think, cause it’s different than probably traditional video that you’ve grown up with, like in a movie, or even a TV commercial or something like that, it’s a little different.
Do you guys do a lot of video at Topeka?
Yeah we do, not as much as I would like, but enough that we now have a video editing suite for our staff to use, so, and then probably with our e-books for libraries thing, we’re gonna try to make that multi-media a bit more, so like me interviewing Gina every couple of weeks about some, some e-book thing in the news or something like that. So we do quite a bit, we have a couple videos a week I think, that go up on YouTube.
Do you all have any kind of like makerspace that your community can come and make things like that?
Yeah, not yet. We would like to. Yeah, well we’ve got a few different plans for that, we’ve got one of our teen librarians is working on some ideas for that, myself and one of our public service staff, or digital branch librarian I think his title is, we’re working on more of a digital media lab idea for the public, and then we’ve got a couple of really cool groups that have sprung up in Topeka, one is Hackerspace, and they want to partner with us, and then another one is a co-working space that wants to partner with us also, and both of those groups are actually doing pretty good for themselves, they’re finding space that they can rent out, and they’re figuring all that kind of business stuff out, but we both know we want to play it nice together, and get our names on each other’s stuff, we’re just trying to still figure out how that works. So ask me that same question next year and I might be able to say yes. Yes, we’re working on it.
And another thing, you sort of do in that kind of realm that just wrapped up was Podcamp Topeka?
Yeah.
Yeah, can you tell me about that, I know the Pod Camp thing started elsewhere, and you kinda picked it up.
So the Pod Camp is just sort of an un-conference about technology, usually social media and web-based technology, and we thought it would be fun to have one, so we’ve done it, this is our fourth one that we’ve done, here in Topeka, we tend to attract a good regional crowd, so three or four states converge in Topeka, Kansas, and we’ve had anywhere, this last time our attendance was down a bit, we had about 50 people, we’ve had a little over 100 before, I think it sort of depends on the keynote speaker we have, cause I think people run pod camps differently, all the different ones that are going on, we tend to make it a pseudo conference, so we have a keynote speaker, and then we have sessions after that, we’re pretty loosey goosey with the sessions, not so much with the keynote, with the session, you can do it as more of a formal presentation, or you can do it just more as a discussion, which is more probably the traditional pod camp way to do things. We don’t get so many people just saying, oh, I want to do a session on the spot, though we usually have a room for that, so we try to plan it out a bit more, but it’s been really good, we get a good group of people from the community, who maybe are marketers or social media directors at their ad agency or their business, small business owners come in, saying I want to learn more about Facebook. Cause I need to use that for my business. That kind of stuff, so it’s usually a really good time. It’s a full day conference, you know, 8 to 4, and there’s a bit of planning on the front end of that, just figuring out when it is, and doing some of the media type stuff so people know about it, but then it sort of runs itself during the day. Which is nice.
I would assume doing part of that is what helped, at least a little bit in your head, helped you figure out the idea for a new book, which is called Face to Face, can you talk a little about that, of how you came up with the idea of why you wanted to write a book about, and I should say the subtitle is “Using Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools to create great customer connections.”
Yes, good job. Cause I was actually on another podcast yesterday and they messed up the subtitle. But then they fixed it later, so I didn’t correct them. So yeah, that’s my second book, in 2008 I wrote a book, and I thought, okay because I’ve done that, I had a really specific idea for that one, that had been bugging me for awhile and so, that was designing the digital experience, and then it had a subtitle after it that I always forget about. I don’t come up with the subtitles. In that book, it was about sort of digital experiences and how to create experiences for customers, and it is almost more of a small textbook on that subject. But a third of that book was devoted to customer connections and customer experiences, and I really enjoyed that part of the book. And as I started thinking about it, honestly one reason I wrote the second book was just thinking as a challenge for myself, I wonder if I can write another book? I think I succeeded at that one, thankfully, but it was just like, I wonder if I can pull that off again? Let’s see. And then as I was thinking about it, I realized that this whole concept of organizations using social media tools slightly different than you do personally, is a pretty big thing.
And just looking around not so much at like Ford or Zappos, cause you know, those big companies get it, like libraries don’t get it, nonprofits don’t always get it, small businesses, not so much, right, even just a website, they don’t always get that. So I thought it would be really fun to write a book, not so much talking about how to use Facebook, but more how to hold conversations, in that text box, or how to hold conversations through video, and how to make connections with your customers or your constituents or your patrons, and that’s what my book is about. So I talk about stuff like, where’s my table of contents, there we go, I have to look at that and I wrote it. Just sort of that, how it’s called Face to Face, so I’m thinking that face to face connection with a business to a customer, how that works. How you can do it through text, how you can do it through video, how you can do it through photos, how you can listen, how to be more conversational in all those settings, what if somebody says something bad about you. Just covering all of that kinds of stuff. I think social media pros would get a few points out of it, I think people who are the rest of us would probably get quite a bit out of it. So that’s what my book is about.
This book is not specifically for libraries, right, it’s for everybody that needs it.
Right, right, any organization or business that needs it, it’s more focused on that. Then I use some library examples, cause obviously that’s what I know.
What do you think the unique qualities of social media are that can help businesses and stuff like that connect with their customers, what is it specifically that social media can bring?
Social media can bring a face and a voice, a personal face and a personal voice to the organization that you can’t get through a brochure and you can’t get through a traditional website. And you can get more on the web because you know, not everybody can fit into your store at the same time. Right? But everybody can fit into your website, into your blog post, into your Twitter account at the same time, if they want to. And then, so if you learn how to be conversational in your writing, so I’ve been telling people to type like you talk, which is a good way to think about it, cause a lot of us in high school I learned how to write a business letter, and how to write an academic paper. I didn’t learn how to write conversationally, you know to my mom or something like that, so sometimes I’ll tell people like my boss Rob Banks, who’s a great boss to work for, he’s told me it’s really hard for me to write conversationally, so I actually told him, read what you wrote out loud, and if it doesn’t sound like something you’d say to me, then rewrite it so it does, and once you figure out how to get that conversational thing going, when people read that, they’ll hear the conversation in their head, cause it will be familiar language, and that sort of makes that personal connection just a little bit more, and it turns that strange organization into sort of a personality and an individual a bit more. And people like to connect with that more, so they’ll think of your company or your organization or your library, in a much more friendly way and want to come back. Cause they’ll feel like they’re having a conversation.
Right [laughs]
We like to do that, and it’s a strange concept, especially if you’re talking about a library or an organization, but it works, that’s how social media works for businesses.
And you went on local TV to promote your book, how was that experience?
Yeah, fun [laughs]. I’ve been on a couple of TV things, locally in Topeka and also in a bigger regional market in Kansas City, it’s strange because they give you like three and a half minutes, and they say talk, they have like three or four questions they want to ask you and you can never quite tell what’s gonna happen, but basically how I think of it, I’m not talking to thousands and thousands of people, I’m talking to about five people, cause there’s the guy who’s sitting by me who’s interviewing me, there’s the cameraman, and maybe a few other people, and if you think about it like that it’s not really so nerve wracking, so that’s what I do, but yeah it is sorta strange.
Don’t think about the entire audience with microphones on?
Yeah, yeah, cause that can freak you out really fast.
I wanted to ask you about your everyday job that you do. You are the digital services director and what exactly does that mean at your library, cause I know that means different things in different libraries.
You can basically translate that to IT manager and web services manager, sort of a combination of those two things. What we like to do at our library with our managers and I guess assistant directors, whatever you want to call that, is sort of give em two hats, and so for me, I’ve got, I wear two hats, one would be a department, sort of a traditional department manager, and one would be more of a concept, which would be our digital branch, our web services. Our book mobile manager, we’ve turned him into a community manager, I think that’s the title for him, and so his job is the traditional bookmobile department, but then also gearing out how to reach our whole county, our library is getting them out to the whole county. More of a concept. So we’re slowly doing that to our managers, and so yeah for me, I got a department, there’s actually a supervisor that’s under me that does a lot of the day to day stuff, which frees me up to do more long range planning and putting on my mean hat once in a while when I have to talk to a vendor that’s not getting us what we want, or just going to those kinds of meetings. Going into the community sometimes, and sharing what we’re doing, and then with the digital branch part of that, I’ll work with teams, task forces, committees, departments, to help make our website better, so I might meet with them, like with one of our blog teams, cause we have a lot of our website divided up into teams of people who are in charge of it, so like our travel neighborhood blog has a team of three or four people who write for it, and they also have responsibilities in part of our physical collection as well, and so I might meet with them and say, hey we’re not getting any comments, or your blog posts are getting read this much, how can we make them be read more? And we’ll work through that. So that’s sort of the kind of stuff I do, lots of meetings, lots of emails.
The higher you go up in an organization, the more meetings you go to.
It’s fun.
Since you have the site sort of divided up amongst staff, do you find that works well for keeping the site up to date, by having it not be, well this is the one person that updates the site, to have a team do it?
For us it works really well that way, cause what we have, again we’re sorta kinda decentralized I guess, we’re sorta centralized and decentralized, I suppose I should say, cause what we do, is part of my IT department I’ve got two guys that focus on the web, a web developer who does a lot of the coding, and then somebody who’s more the designer, more the visual part of that, and then, we have what we call our creative group, which is me, those guys, the web guys, and our marketing department, and then some public service staff thrown in the mix too, we meet every week and talk about websites, and marketing, and promotion and that kind of stuff, and we’ll even go through like a section of the website and come up with brainstorming to make that section better. We do that every week. And then from there it goes out to more of our content developers, and we have, we probably got 30 to 60 people, who regularly work on the website, I suppose, we’re a pretty big library, we have 220-some staff altogether, and that works really well, especially if there’s somebody who’s in charge of it all, as the executive editor, which I guess is, that’s me, in this case, and we do the same thing with our social media too, so I’m not doing all of that, like our Facebook account, I’m one of the administrators on it certainly, but we have, again we have a team of people who are right now focused on readers and advisory and current events. I think those are the main two areas that we’re trying to push with Facebook right now. And then my big job with the web, and with social media, would be to experiment with new tools, so when Pinterest came out I signed up for it, tried to figure it out, see if it would work for the library, and I also get to answer the mean comments sometimes, if there’s something that’s particularly odd out there, I’ll be the person who says, hey you can’t say that on our website, and I’ll block you if you do it again. You know that kind of stuff, so it works for us, it works really well for us. But mainly because we’ve given everybody some responsibility, it’s not just a yeah, you can volunteer for this if you want to do it.
You personally have been blogging for about 10 years now.
Yeah, that’s weird.
Do you remember what sort of appealed to you in the first place of why you wanted to start doing that?
Yeah, I actually approached blogging like I do most stuff, for work anyway, I said “oh that’s a new, interesting tool, I wonder how it works?” And so I signed up for like a Blogger account, and wrote a blog post or two, just to figure out the tool. And then thought well, I could use this, as sort of an extended Delicious kind of thing, where if I find something interesting, I can say this was interesting and here’s why. And then people started following me, which I thought was really cool, I think at one point I had 30 or 60 people who were subscribed to my blog, and I was like, that’s really weird. But it’s sort of cool too. Wow.
These people are listening to me. [laughs]
Yeah, who knew? At that time it sort of seemed sort of like listeners were, there’d be somebody who you always wanted to like, read their post, but you had more of a say this way, because it was your own voice, and then people could comment on that, I was like, this is sort of a cool tool, I like it. And then just sort of kept developing it from there.
Every once in awhile I’ll talk to somebody on Twitter or in face to face or whatever, and they’ll say, oh I love the Podcast, and I’m like, oh, I guess people listen to me.
Yeah, go figure, wow. Yeah, it’s really interesting, like people at conferences will come up to me and say, I read your blog, you did this post and it, it, meant this to me or whatever, I’m like, that’s really cool. Wow. Huh!
Is there, it doesn’t have to be an exhaustive list here, but is there anybody in particular that you follow online, that you learn a lot from on a regular basis?
Gosh.
Again, not an exhaustive list.
Yeah, cause I follow like 200-some blogs, um, trying to think, right now not, it’s sort of scattered cause I follow so many things, and not everybody posts like they used to.
Right, it seems to have dropped off.
Yeah. You know, I still follow Sara Houghton’s blog, Librarian in Black, she’s not posting as much right now, she’s got a fairly new job that’s.
Right, she got promoted. [laughs]
Yeah, probably quite taxing, I imagine she’ll reappear eventually, she has really good stuff to say though. One guy who I follow, Aaron Schmitdt’s, Walking Paper blog, he doesn’t post that often either, but when he does it’s usually about some design thing in libraries, that’s really quite cool. I still like blogs like ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, that kind of stuff.
Right, for all the techie stuff?
Yeah, yeah. So I just follow lots of different things, and sort of treat it as a news thing, what blogs do you follow, what should I be reading?
Wow, you put me on the spot. The same kind of stuff, and I read, I’m an Apple kind of guy so I read a lot of MacWorld, Mac-ie kind of podcasts and stuff.
There you go.
You know Bobbi Newman, she doesn’t write much anymore either.
Yeah, yeah, she’s on my always read list.
Andy Woodworth, it’s kind of, if you go back and look at the people who have been on, I’ve had on the show. Those are the people I follow.
Oh, okay, well there you go. And those are all great people to follow, probably all of them are in my list too.
And Jessamyn West, all those great people.
We need some more bloggers out there, don’t we?
Yes we do.
Not that anybody’s doing a bad job, but I want to read somebody new too, who has good ideas.
Right, that’s what I like when they come out, when Library Journal does the Movers and Shakers thing, it’s like oh new people I can find, and.
Right, exactly.
Number one, number one, follow online, but also talk to on the show too.
Yeah well that’s what I like about going to conferences too, because there will be a turnover, you know for a few years, there will be sort of the same people talking, like even at computers and libraries or something, suddenly you’re like, who are all these people, oh they have really cool ideas, let’s see what they have to say.
It’s nice sometimes to get the new people interacting with the, people who’ve been around, I mean cause Jessamyn’s always, been around for awhile but she always has things relevant to say, but then you have people just brand new, right out of the profession and they’re interacting and all those people, like ALA Think Tank and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah the ALA Think Tank’s a pretty cool idea, cause those are a lot of newer voices that have some really cool ideas.
And I think the Emerging Leaders program helps with that kind of thing, encourages that kind of thing too.
Yeah it does, I think it does, there’s some good things like that out there.
Okay, David, where can people go to find out more about you and your work online?
Yeah, well they can, you can visit my blog, DavidLeeKing.com, and there, I mean that’s where my blog is, stuff I’ve done, there’s a link, big huge link to my book, there that will eventually of course lead you to Amazon, that’s probably the best place.
All right, thanks so much for being on the show and talking to me today.
Yeah, thanks for having me it was fun.
Thanks. Bye.
Circulating Ideas 