WeblogsAndWikis FacultyTechDays2005
Contents
Academic Publishing with Weblogs and Wikis: Faculty Technology Days 2005
Introduction
Weblogs and wikis allow individuals and small groups to readily publish information to the internet using "personal publising" tools. By placing the locus of control into the hands of each user, the publishing process becomes efficient and highly personalized.
What is personal publishing?
- old model: top-down, authoritarian, restricted
- traditional journals
- books
- new model: bottom-up, personal, free
- filtering happens on the reader's side, not the publisher's side
- the internet is not read-only
- everyone has a voice - it's yours to exercise
- what would happen if all meaningful knowledge was readily available?
How is that different than the world wide web is now?
The internet started out with some very lofty ideas - that anyone could create and publish content, which could be used and reused by anyone, anywhere, anytime. The Usenet was based on contributions of all (or nearly all) users.
That worked fine, until the late '90s, when the internet became largely commercialized and institutionalized as the World Wide Web. It shifted to be a more read-only system, mirroring broadcast technologies like radio and television. The act of publishing content was restricted to a small subset of internet users, and content was often massaged and filtered by PR and legal departments before being released onto the internet.
With the advent of more social publishing tools like weblogs, wikis, and several other relatively new technologies, the power of publishing has been pulled back into the hands of individuals. A single person can have a voice that is heard as loudly (or moreso) as a multinational corporation's carefully controlled message. News is becoming more truthful and honest.
However, with the increase of individual voices, we need to develop our own personal "crap filters" - strategies to detect trusted sources of content to help you distinguish what is meaningful to you from the noise (and there will be a lot of noise - that's not necessarily a bad thing however).
Our job is to speak up. To exercise our voices. And, to interact with others around the world to create rich, collaborative networks based on real-world communities of practice.
The Cluetrain Manifesto states that markets (or business or education) are now a conversation - not something that is broadcast or published, but produced through interaction between individuals on all sides of a relationship. If you haven't read the Manifesto yet, please do so. It will change how you think about interactions and markets.
