wising up to wisdom of the crowds
at 11:07am on Monday, 23rd January 2006
Web 2.0 is a catchy way of talking about a set of principles with which most popular online tools are now aligned: user-driven, emergent, participatory (and the list goes on). Usually, instead of clarifying what this means, the examples people use to describe web 2.0 lead deeper into lingo: wikis, tag clouds, folksonomies, mashups, AMV (anime music videos) to name just a few.
As Duncan noted last week, in the case of wikipedia, the legitimacy of these types of tools can be called into question as authority shifts from a centralised push of information to a more distributed aggregation of the info that's out there. But no one would question the usefulness of google, and that's a tool that uses the logic of viewers to decide search rankings.
Is it just a matter of time, then, before wikipedia is a more trusted source than Encyclopedia Britannica? I imagine that there's a place for both. But wikipedia is constantly updated and free (so is a lot of content in the Encyclopedia Britannica too, to be fair), so guess which one I use?
Web 2.0 is a catchy way of talking about a set of principles with which most popular online tools are now aligned: user-driven, emergent, participatory (and the list goes on). Usually, instead of clarifying what this means, the examples people use to describe web 2.0 lead deeper into lingo: wikis, tag clouds, folksonomies, mashups, AMV (anime music videos) to name just a few.
As Duncan noted last week, in the case of wikipedia, the legitimacy of these types of tools can be called into question as authority shifts from a centralised push of information to a more distributed aggregation of the info that's out there. But no one would question the usefulness of google, and that's a tool that uses the logic of viewers to decide search rankings.
Is it just a matter of time, then, before wikipedia is a more trusted source than Encyclopedia Britannica? I imagine that there's a place for both. But wikipedia is constantly updated and free (so is a lot of content in the Encyclopedia Britannica too, to be fair), so guess which one I use?
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