Monthly Archives: April 2008
Online Libraries Are Not Libraries At All
David Weinberger on why online libraries are not libraries at all: "So, even if the distributed online library we’re building at first seems sort of like a library, it will quickly invent itself into something new, something unpredictable and quite possibly, something that will change us deeply."
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Social Media Will Change Your Business
Catch up or catch you later. Social media will change your business: "But here's betting that we [professional publishers] also forge ahead in the open world. The measure of success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be those who host the very best conversations."
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The Art of Doing Something Well
Technology can make us forget the full meaning of craftsmanship, to lose sight of its human dimension. But even in our post-industrial society, western economies continually create niche markets for fine craftsmanship like wine-making, artisanal coffee, linux software, handmade furniture.
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Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?
Lots of interesting conclusions in this study about social bookmarking's role in web search: Tags are present in the pagetext of 50% of the pages they annotate and in the titles of 16% of the pages they annotate. Tags are in context and many tagged pages would be discovered by a search engine (p.8).
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Why is Web 2.0 Failing in Biology
A pessimist's view of why scientists do not participate in social networking sites. According to an anonymous postdoc: "I can barely keep up iwth the literature in my field and with what my labmates are doing. Who has time to spend reading some grad student's blog?"
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Purposeful Networking
Stephanie Sandifer's point, that purposeful networking is a 21st century skill and should become part of mainstream education, is a proof-of-concept post: it would not have happened without Twitter.
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With a Few More Brains
Nicholoas Kristof talks about the dumbing down of discourse in America, and suggests that "the complex and incomplete solution is a greater emphasis on education at every level."
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The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature
Stories can offer so much pleasure that studying them hardly seems like work. In fact, says Brian Boyd, "Attention--engagement in the activity--matters before meaning."
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The battle for Wikipedia’s soul
It is the biggest encyclopedia in history and the most successful example of user-generated content. The inevitable result of growing pains, all kinds of rules have been devised to measure a subject's worthiness for inclusion in Wikipedia (or “notabilityâ€, in the jargon of Wikipedians). But now the "threshold for writing articles for Wikipedia is now so high that very few people actually do it."
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Weekend Food Blogging: Oatcakes