Creating and Maintaining a Blog

Now that we have made our way past the exploration of private and public information, and how to sufficiently protect that information, we can make our way into the realm of how information is created and maintained. For most individuals familiar with the world wide web Wikipedia is a precise illustration of how information is created and maintained, but would you consider it a social system?

I have always thought of social systems to be sites such as Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter rather than Wikipedia, where you are most often socializing with a complete stranger, by posting information rather than holding any type of conversation.

Other than using Wikipedia on a regular basis to look up basic information for my own personal needs, and being told by a large number of instructors not to use it as a cited source in papers, I do not have a lot of prior background knowledge surrounding Wikipedia.  I am amazed to find that it is has not become chaotic, due to the large number of the pages that can be freely edited by the audience.

Should Wikipedia be considered a “blog”? The term blog seems to be so ambiguous, and the definition so vague, that there is a discrepancy on whether or not it should be considered a medium or a genre. On one hand, it appears to be similar to a blog in the way that users can freely post information to be shared amongst one another. On the other hand, it is somewhat of a dictionary in its own right which is definitely not the same thing as a blog. Simply determining a definition would then allow us to categorize it as a blog, dictionary, or hybrid of the two.

In the past decade a number of bubbles and shakeouts have occurred with the ever expanding world of technology. From past experiences, such as the dotcom bubble, we know that there are only destined to be more, but do we have a way of predicting what they might be? Before taking this class I had no prior knowledge of the specific differences and “shakeouts” that have occurred between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

It is interesting to think as software as a service rather than a product. I personally hate the idea of not being able to have a tangible product in my hand. Although internet software is truly a service, I have always been content to hold the manual and box for the software in my hand and think of it as a tangible product. In reality it is a service that is constantly evolving, and like all other customers I am not paying for a one time product, but a lifelong service.

After reading the definition that Wikipedia has for itself on Wikipedia I began to wonder, if like all other encyclopedia style articles generated by Wikipedia, the definition itself was created by audience contributions. If it is in fact one of those few pages that has limited editing access it is somewhat ironic that audience members are able to participate in a majority of pages, but not the Wikipedia page itself.

Amazingly within Wikipedia no article is owned by its creator. Instead of fussing over fair use laws and issues of information protection it has been made simple so that individuals can “volunteer” their information, knowing that it will be shared and spread amongst millions. This in itself has potentially minimized a large number of “bubbles” and “shakeouts” that Wikipedia may have otherwise faced.

Overall, considering how Wikipedia works it only seems logical to generate definitions and write ups based on the collaboration of many users and their input. My only hope is that the information generated and expelled from Wikipedia will become as valued in our professional and educational lives as it appears to be in our personal lives.

~ by Shelby Iverson on January 22, 2012.