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Call for a Universal Blog Icon

We’re hard at work to set up a network of library blogs at MPOW. In our efforts to find natural linkages between our existing web content and the incoming blogs, the blog planners and I thought it might be helpful to come up with a shorthand term to denote what’s coming from the blogs. If you look at our website, you’ll see we make liberal use of the RSS icon, and we’ve found that it helps out considerably.

But there’s no such thing for blogs. Probably the closest thing we have is the Blogger icon, as seen below:

But we’re not running on Blogger, and I’m certian the WordPress/LiveJournal/Movable Type would have something to say about this becoming the standard.

So I put it to you, fair Interwebs: What’s should the blog icon be?

This entry was posted Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 12:06 pm and is filed under mpow, social software. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Eric_Thriller
  • Eric_Thriller
    This is the same question we ran across with our design and development team. Some people created

    B with rings (like the RSS) = Not Original

    B like Blogger = Already used.

    We need to find a way to incorporate a universal connection through blogs and websites.

    Creating an identity for "Blogs" is a great idea. We just have to find the right identity for it!
  • Sally
    Thanks for asking the question! I am contemplating the same issue now as I have been asked to come up with an icon to use as a visual link to my websites list of blogs. Wish I had the answer!

    Many folks do seem to use the red B, others I have noticed are using round buttons with capital B's on them.

    In my case, we will use one as a visual link to my websites list of blogs (we have several).
  • Toby
    That's an excellent question, Michael. I think as our site continues to evolve, we thinking about ways to delineate the more static content of the traditional website from the more fluid material on the blogs.

    We'd like to indicate that visitors can respond to certain pages in a way they can't with the site as it currently exists. As we develop the audience for this sort of thing, I would hope some of these features start to bleed into the older pages on the website.

    In a lot of ways, I think this could help spur the evolution of the way our patrons interact with the library website. But to make that transition take place, we need to make sure our audience knows what's what.
  • Dan
    What about some kind of electrified quill? Haha. Or perhaps a "B" like blogger, but with a completely different look. It could be embossed over a small globe, signifying the web. Anyway, good luck.
  • Ok, I'll ask the big question. Why do you need an icon to say something came from a blog? Who really cares if it came from a blog, or a feed, or from a photocopy for that matter? The RSS icon indicates that there's an alternative way to get information, not the information's source.
  • Eric_Thriller
    If you look at today's society everything has a reflection of itself visually. People connect themselves personally to objects and designs now more that ever.

    A blog is not an RSS feed. They are two totally different means of communication.

    Think about apps on an iPhone. Each one of those has a certain identity to relate to.

    So creating an identity for "Blogs" is a great idea. We just have to find the right identity for it!
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