Wiki Wiki Everywhere

Wikis are a technology that I'm vaguely familiar with - at least what they are in general. I understood that anyone can contribute to a wiki, though I didn't understand quite how that worked. After reading some of the articles and playing around a bit, I think I get it a little better. The possibilities of wikis seems pretty impressive: by enabling anyone to modify pages, you open your site up to an unlimited supply of collective intelligence. Wiki sites also become very welcoming and an inviting place to share ideas and expertise.

The downside, of course, is that anyone can modify the pages. Anyone including people who think they know about a topic but in reality know nothing and spammers or hackers who delight in making every visit to the website a nightmare. I've visited wikis several times - especially wikipedia - and have been pretty impressed with what I've seen. Unfortunately, I also have to continually take anything on such pages with a grain of salt. Information I find on Wikipedia is fine if all I'm looking for is surface value, but if I ever need to be sure of something, I may start at Wikipedia, but feel that I must verify anything I find from a source whose validity is less suspect. I still remember a fellow student in one of my classes who used Wikipedia as his main source for his presentation and was appalled to discover that not only were there many uncorroborated opinions, but blatently wrong facts as well.

One answer to this problem that I see is used in some of the other Wikis I've visited. Instead of allowing anyone to post, you must somehow prove that you know about a subject before you are cleared to edit a page. Either that, or having learned moderators who observe new content and keep innacurate information out.

LibraryThing: Animal, Vegitable, or Mineral

Here's the URL for my profile on LibraryThing.

http://www.librarything.com/profile/honor_harrington

I chose LibraryThing over Goodreads mainly because I already have a Goodreads account and was curious to see how the two sites differed. One of the main differences that I see is that LibraryThing charges users if they want to list more than a certain number of books on their account. Maybe I'm just cheap, but this idea doesn't appeal to me at all and doesn't really promote the Library feel. I do, however, like the fact that you can get recommendations based on what books are on your list.

I also like, in theory, the ability to find other users who like the same books as you do and start conversations. I love to discuss and critique novels, though normally I like to do so with people I'm already comfortable with. Starting conversations with random strangers is still not high on my list - which is probably why I've been so reticent about so many of the parts of this 2.0 project.

Still..if you really want to talk to people about something, books make better subjects than most, and these sites just might encourage people to read more.

Technicalities and Technorati

Maybe I'm just being dense, but I don't quite see how technorati is so much different from all the other blog searches available. It does seem to go to more lengths to organize the blogosphere into easily digestible chunks, but how useful is that, really? I guess if I were to base the value of a blog on how popular it was, technorati could be helpful. But what goes into determining if a blog is popular or not? I'm assuming it has to do with how many people visit the blog and possibly give it some kind of rating. But how do I know that their visiting a blog or their rating of it provides an accurate portrayal of how usefull a blog is? As has been mentioned several times throughout this web 2.0 program, anyone can create a blog and say pretty much anything they want. Though I know absolutely nothing about the topics, I could create a blog espousing various and sundry theories about quantum mechanics or the best way to rid your backyard of moles, and if I made my blog interesting and/or attractive enough, I could theoretically attract many visitors and become quite popular. That still doesn't mean, however, that I have any clue about what I'm writing.

Instead of monitoring a blog's popularity, I would be more interested in a blog search that attempted to organize blogs based on their usefullness and accuracy. Assuming such a thing is possible, of course.

Persp.ecti.ves O.n Del.icio.us Book.mar.king

Finally something in this web 2.0 that I can find imminently useful with nary a reservation (i.e. I may not complain in this entry). The idea of del.icio.us seems really cool to me. I know there have been lots of times when I wanted to access a site that I'd bookmarked on my home laptop from a different computer and couldn't manage to dredge up a clue what the url was. In the past, I tried to find it with Google, but even when that worked, it generally took longer than I wanted to devote to the task. This technology reminds me of Meebo in the idea that it enables you to access "stuff" - be they IM friends lists or bookmarks - from any Internet-connected computer. Since, however, I use bookmarks much more than IM, del.icio.us is far more useful.

If I could only remember where the periods go without looking it up.

Of course there is another aspect to del.icio.us. That whole "social" thing. As someone who tends to research rather esoteric subjects, I can see how it would be very handy to be able to enter a tag and see other sites that had been thus labled. It might also be useful when trying to answer a reference question. Instead of trying to slog through a bunch of useless search-engine-generated websites to find a couple good ones, you could use the tags from del.icio.us to zero in on (supposedly) proven pages. Even if not all tags were useful, they would definately provide a better place to start.

Random River of Ramblings

Words will follow, oh yes they will, but first:


See my brainscanner results


Now where was I? Ah: I've covered the 'random' part, now for the 'ramblings'.

I must admit, some of these mashups are fun for a bit of good ol' time wasting. My favorite was the R2D2 translator, but I couldn't get it to post on my blog. Nothing like R2 bleeping "All your base are belong to us." But I'll just have to leave it to everyone's imaginations.

I'm still not sure where these fit in with the whole idea of being useful in a library context. Though with R2, anything's possible. I guess it's good to be knowledgable that this kind of technology exists if patrons ask about it, but aside from fits and giggles, I don't really see a lot of use for personalized fortune cookie messages.

Then again, maybe the library could put together its own themed generators, thus creating an entirely new paradigm of time-wastage and taking over the world through individualized book titles and dewey decimal classifications.

Civilization may never be the same.



And now to leave you with something completely different: