If you have been reading library blogs this week, you have seen the discussion on “shameless self-promotion” and the like. Meredith Farkas’ Shameless self-promoter at Information Wants to Be Free is the latest one I have seen, and she recaps the previous posts, so you can start there and work backward if you have missed out.

I don’t want to beat a dead horse, and I certainly don’t want to take anyone to task for previous posts or comments. But I did want to say something about self-promotion.

I love the over-prolific alpha geeks on the web. Take Cory Doctorow. His profile seems a little lower than it was a few years ago, but in the early aughts, Doctorow’s blogging at boingboing is what got me excited about the web again, after it seemed like all the interesting weird stuff on the web was getting overtaken by corporate web gunk.

For a while there, he seemed like the mayor of the Web. He blogged incessantly, he promoted his science fiction writing (releasing the full text of his novels online with Creative Commons licenses) and generally was omnipresent. He also was (and is) a shameless self-promoter. He promoted his books, his talks, his ideas, everything he was into.

And I ate it up. Doctorow’s posts on boingboing about copyright, the Creative Commons, digital rights management, and on and on were often my first exposure to the subjects (not to mention Internet trivia and culture like “all your base”, 1337speak and the like).

These days, I’m also a big Merlin Mann fan. His flagship site, 43 Folders, covers lifehacks and the like. That site has mutated into a one-man self-publishing, community-building empire with 43F Podcasts, 43F Wiki, the 43F Board, and the 43F Google Group (there is probably a 43F pirate radio station and a 43F credit union that I just haven’t heard of yet).

Cory Doctorow and Merlin Mann aren’t necessarily the smartest guys or best writers out there (though I think they are both plenty smart and quite good writers (just about every Merlin Mann post has an LOL moment for me, anyway)), but they know how to hustle, promote, and sell themselves.

I’m very happy that we have a group of over-prolific alpha librarians on the web. They may not always be the best librarians–there is always someone somewhere that knows more–but the mere fact that they are moving and shaking and getting people excited about blogs or wikis or institutional repositories or library marketing or whatever is great. And I think that blogs make these folks so much more accessible than research articles or even magazine columns did in the past: I have had at least one email or blog-comment contact with just about every big-deal library blogger, and the same with Cory Doctorow and Merlin Mann. I don’t say that to claim that I am a big deal because people return my email; it’s just that the kind of people who blog are the kind of people who want to engage with their audience.

Of course, the flip side to all this moving and shaking is burnout. Steven Cohen has blogged about it recently at Library Stuff, and who can blame him for wanting to spend more time with his family. I have had my own minor burnout in recent weeks.

But, in general, I have a high tolerance for self-promotion. Maybe it is because I once wanted to be an actor, a profession where self-promotion is a basic requirement. If a person is consistently interesting, thought-provoking, and generous, I don’t much care if they come off as an egotist or a climber. I’m happy to latch on and see where they take me.