Library Web Chic

Two good articles in this month's Wired

The March issue of Wired includes two really neat articles. One is
on the podcasting movement and Adam Curry who is reponsible for the
iPodder software. The other is about Wikipedia and the people behind
that project. Both of these articles are likely present because this
issue also contains the Wired Rave Awards. Ironically, both of these
projects were nominated for the Technology Rave award but didn't win.
That honor went to the founder of Bloglines, Mark Fletcher.

The iPodder articles discusses what podcasting is and how it
originated. It also offers readers advice about how to create their own
podcasts. There also is a nice snippet of information about Ourmedia
which is a project being backed by the Internet Archive which will
provide free podcasting tools and a permenant hosting space for podcast
somtime in mid-2005. If you are interested in podcasting and don't know
alot about it then check this nifty overview out.

Since I've been playing with podcasting the podcasting article in
Wired was interesting but not very informative for me. However, the Wikipedia
article in Wired was much more enlightening. I've been trying to
develop a better understanding of Wikis and the Wikipedia thing for
sometime now. it is amazing how you can be involved with one facet of
technology and not know much about another facet. Wikis are a facet
that I am relatively unfamilar with, so the Wikipedia article was great
because it gave me a much better handle on the concept of Wikis and
where Wikipedia came from.

On one level the Wikipedia concept is fascinating. On another
terrifying. How do we know who contributed this stuff and if they know
what they are talking about. However, allowing anyone to contibute
content means that shared meaning of things get developed, which
personally I think is a good thing. The other thing about Wikipedia
that I like is that expert knowledge is not a privileged as it is in
academia. As some who works in academia you might wonder why I think
this is a bad thing. Well… let's just say I've seen the dark side of
academia and terrible places that the notion of privileged expertise
can lead to. It has been part of what I will refer to as “The Saga of
My Significant Other's PhD Work”. What the saga has taught me is that
qualified and knowledgable people can be denied a graduate degree and
that getting published isn't always about the quality of your work. If
you want to know the full story you will have to catch up with me at a
conference sometime. Prudence says airing such dirty laundry on this
blog is not a good idea. The bottom line is that a project like
Wikipedia allows talented and intelligent people to contribute without
having to flash “privileged expert” badge. I like that idea very much.
It seems very democratic to me. Another concept about Wikipedia that I
like is that, as the article mentions, it is a living breathing thing.
In my opinion this is much more true to the nature of knowledge: shared
and continually growing.