Is Paul missing Big Blue, the cattle logger Babe? You bet he is! Why, in his current state of confusion he can't even tell his axe from a hole in the ground! He's hacked his way through a whole forest of blog posts, flickr pictures, chocolate covered news feeds and other rssmadazles till his head can't spin any faster and the cobwebs are gathering truly world widely.
Whatever happened to the places for everything and everything in them? Have their library of congressional numbers been washed in a new dawn's dewey decimation? Can we get a handle on ...just getting started.......
Back to beginning again (after Sarah's comment and wiki week 7):
Blogs are online repositories of repeated postings of content from an identified individual, together with more or less occasional comments from viewers (and reviewers) of that content. Through the magical interconnectedness of the World Wide Web of computer assisted electronic communication, the content of each blog is a resource that can be accessed from anywhere else on The Web by its Universal Resource Locator (URL). This is like the spot on the shelf designated by a Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal call number. Only not.
Call numbers classify books according to their contents so that books about the same thing or by the same author get shelved together where we can find them and browse for others like them. URLs are more like bar codes in that they are assigned to blogs and other web resources without regard to their content.
Of course, the content of any particular book tends to remain fairly constant through time while the content of a blog or some other types of web pages is expected to change frequently.
When a source of web content is expected to refresh itself frequently with new content, Really Simple Syndication feeds information about updates to viewer/reviewers who, thinking they might be interested in the forthcoming content, subscribe.
The class seemed to agree that Deli.cio.us was likely more useful for libraries than Techorati. I've found it personally so so far but have been wondering why. I guess it comes down to the wider range of resource types that Deli facilitates access to as compared to Technorat's narrower focus on blogs. Blogs are more or less lasting links to their bloggers but their contents are as mutable and only as reliable as those bloggers. The web pages I've collected in Deli so far (Algonquian language related sites) are more book-like. They are dedicated to a particular subject and although the contents are updated occasionally, the changes are more like revised editions of books.
Blogger has their bloggers label each of their posts so the contents will be more intuitively retrievable for future reference. Deli.cio.us and Technorati let viewer/reviewers tag other people's web sites for their reference purposes regardless of how the original resource owners have labeled them. These labels and tags correspond to the subject headings, keywords and descriptors of traditional library catalogs and indexes, but generally lack the systematic rigor and comprehensive organization of these more formal categories.
Those more formal categories are often listed in outline form. These lists take the form of hierarchical trees with the more comprehensive concepts branching out into ever more specific notions. Now the trees have been leveled and their branching structures reduced to linear lumber.
1 comment:
Very interesting, Eric!
Sarah
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