Week 12 Readings

The article on blogs hit home for me with one of its points about what it's like trying to collaborate with people for a project via e-mail. That's what I'm doing for my poster project in 2000 right now, and - like the article predicted - my inbox has quickly become twice as full as it was before.
The article on library instruction and wikis recalled for me time wasted in my undergraduate studies not too long ago. While I did occasionally learn something from these sorts of sessions, I usually just wanted to zone out. If I could have instead taught myself what I needed to know when I needed to know it by reading wikis, that would have been an improvement.
I wasn't terribly persuaded by the article on "folksonomies" - a term I feel justified in placing in scare quotes since it's only been around for three years and it sounds ridiculous. Why enlist faculty or librarians to create special bookmarks when they could simply submit lists of useful sites along with their respective hyperlinks? Allowing users to post their own tags sounds almost as stupid as the you-won't-find-that-in-any-dictionary term for it: "spagging".
Even though I knew plenty about Wikipedia before watching the video on it - shot in mid-2005 - I still learned a few interesting facts about the site. Those facts are: 1) only 1/3 of the traffic to the site is to English-language pages, 2) perhaps 1,000 people are responsible for the majority of edits made to the site, and 3) freely-licensed textbooks are in the works. That last point is actually quite exciting!