Twitter is fab for small, ephemeral snippets and quick chatty witticisms. And for building a sense of community and creating a real, viable network that can be called on outside Twitter. Yay Twitter!

BUT … once upon a time, about 8 or so years ago, Australian libraryland had a thriving, buzzing community of longer-form thoughts and more considered conversation; distributed and archived across our blogs daily. Honestly, Hugh, as Kate says, it was different to Twitterworld… and I’d go as far as saying “better for some things”.

Every June for the last six years, a group of Australian library bloggers have committed to blogging every day in June, as blogjune . You can see the history of the first blogjune at Con’s blog, Blogging, thankfully .

Peta has been wonderfully organised and come up with a neat way to register:

register by tweeting your blog URL with hashtag #iambloggingjune.

You can then pop over to her post, Blogjune is looming, and see the list of people who are joining in. (While you are there, check out her responses to the Research Data 23 Things . Fabulous stuff!)

Blogjune is a chance for people to give to their peers and the profession. I want to commit to doing this. So do many in the community of wonderfully clever, chatty, generous Australian library bloggers.  If you are one of them, please join in and share, even if you just do one post and then decide you are out.  Please do not underestimate the value of posting small, trivial-seeming things, unrelated to libraries in any way. These are the “spaces inbetween” the professional conversation and vibrant, interesting and essential.

The secret is – anyone can be part of this community. This is not because we are indiscriminate, just (I hope) welcoming and supportive. The overhead (go start a blog and start chatting) is relatively low. Being the person who asks “why?” or says “I don’t understand” or “why don’t they do things this way?” is valuable and helps keep the conversation relevant. June is the BEST time to start a blog in libraryland because there are people to chat with … and if you are a student, I KNOW that you are probably in between semesters and it is a good time to put your toe in the water. (OUA SP2 students excepted :))

You, yes you, who may consider yourself just a casual passer-by here, can contribute too, even if you do not blog. Read and think about what is posted. Generally someone publishes a file you can add to an RSS reader to keep up to date. Just take some of the ideas from the liblogosphere (yes, we called it that…) and carry them into the real world.

Or comment. Comments keep bloggers on their toes, are just plain nice to receive (even ill-thought-out and critical ones – “OMG! someone is reading this!”) and provide stimulus for further conversation in the comments, as longer posts by others and distributed across other platforms like Twitter.