The O’Reilly Radar posted a great interview with Clay Shirky, where he talks about the economics of group action, job-related stuff, and the importance of ambitious/flexible business models. I was particularly interested in his comments about “information overload” and what that means for searching/filtering online… The video’s about 18 minutes long, and I think it’s worth checking out.
Also, the interviewer referred to Web 2.0 as “two-dot-oh,” which I haven’t heard said aloud before…
I’ve finally been catching up on my extracurricular RSS feeds this week, after being behind for quite a while (I still have 1000+!), and I came across this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, discussing the recent beta launch of Brainify.com, which is a social bookmarking/social networking site for people affiliated with higher education (think del.icio.us meets Yahoo Answers meets Facebook-in-its-first-couple-years). The site’s founder is Murray Goldberg, a computer science instructor at the University of British Columbia, who also developed WebCT.
There are a number of interesting features, although it’s still early, so their utility is somewhat limited so far… The site supports user bookmarking, tagging, member-created groups, brief personal profiles, friending, and question asking/answering. As an information science person, I’m interested in the focus on developing a thorough academic taxonomy (although, in the site’s blog, he suggests that it’s a “multi-onomy,” since it’s supposed to be community-created, but I’m not especially impressed by the creativity in naming things, so I’ll go with the cutesy, slightly more established “folksonomy” instead) to identify the patterns that emerge from group tagging exclusively in academia.
One of the most novel concepts of this site (to me, anyway, which may not mean that it’s so novel for others), is the idea of “Pseudo Community-Ownership.” As Goldberg writes in this blog post, “The most concise definition I can give for PCO is this: ‘In the event of a sale, the intent of PCO is to share sale proceeds with the community members in proportion to the contribution made by each member to that community’.” Essentially, he says that, if Brainify is ever sold, they would distribute 30% of the sale proceeds among the site’s members in proportion with their “reputation” scores. Like other online communities, people can gather points by doing things like inviting others, answering questions, bookmarking sites, tagging bookmarks logically, etc.
In order to register with the site, one must have an .edu email address, although you can designate an alternate address as your contact email once you sign up and adjust your profile and account settings. Some may dislike the exclusivity involved with requiring a higher education-affiliated email address, but Goldberg mentions that in the site’s blog too, emphasizing that after the site is more established, it may branch out into other domains.
I don’t know how much popularity this site will achieve or how quickly, but I think it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on… And as the founder says in this article, “These kind of social sites, they’re very chicken and egg-y in the sense that they’re not very interesting until you have a lot of people there … and people don’t come until they’re kind of interesting.” Might as well participate and see where it goes – could at least be a good exercise in watching an online “web 2.0″ community grow…
Even before I began my master’s program a few years ago, I was very interested in information literacy–particularly in how people learn how to find and make sense of information… I’ve always felt adept at locating relevant information quickly and efficiently, but, in the same way that I don’t remember actually learning to “touch type” quickly, I don’t remember formally learning information-seeking processes. It just seems to have always been there. I’m sure I’m failing to acknowledge the many great teachers I had growing up who taught me other things about how to discern quality information (and, in fact, maybe that’s a hallmark of good instruction — that it’s now so ingrained that I don’t remember not being able to do it… i don’t know).
Since so much of the Information Sciences program was aimed at helping create “Information Professionals” who know how to organize, access, and disseminate information (typically on behalf of other people, and typically while serving in a librarian-type capacity), I know stuff about search strategies and locating good sources, but I’m not sure of the best ways to help relay such information to others in a brief enough, easy-to-use enough format… As we’ve talked about in class, part of the joy of Web 2.0 is its user-friendliness — that people don’t have to understand how to program (X)HTML/CSS code in order to blog, they can just sign up to a free service and write essentially wysiwyg-style — Just like people shouldn’t have to know how to create a query using command-lines in formal information retrieval databases just to find out who wrote a particular novel. But then again, if the title of the novel is “Dog,” then they should probably understand that Googling the word “dog” is likely an inefficient search for the information they’re seeking.
