Curmudgeon 2.0 (continued): Blogs and Wikis, oh my!

The next stop in our overview of Library 2.0 is Wikis!

But first a word on Blogs, which I didn't comment on specifically in my last post.

Interesting figures on blogging here:

http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/

A study done by Universal-McCann (March 2008) suggest 184 million blogs floating around on the Web. That's a hell of a lot of blogging to sift through. Where does the average user even start? Yet the Universal-McCann figures suggest that 75% of the web users are also blog readers. One has to wonder if they're simply following the daily meanderings of various friends and relatives, or if there are a lot of blogs out there with big followings.

Following Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap.") the potential blog reader is left to wonder and wander in search of the 18.4 million blogs out there that might be worth more than a cursory glance.

The Curmudgeon observes: There are a lot of well written, entertaining, and/or informative blogs out there. Too many to even follow a fraction of a fraction closely. At the side is the issue of plowing through the crap to get at the good stuff, and then plowing through the good stuff to get at the good stuff of interest to the specific reader, and then still being overwhelmed by the output. Mostly I tend to stumble over interesting blogs Googling for information on specific topics. I'll bookmark those blogs, but I rarely get back to them.

I tried the review route with a book Ultimate blogs : masterworks from the wild Web by Sarah Boxer, but I have to conclude that, as with all reviewed things, one person's masterwork is another person's spam. I will look around for additional blog review sources. Or maybe, as with books and music and movies, I'll continue to limp along following the good, the indifferent, and the bad.


Wikis are another creature entirely, being a product essentially designed by a committee. I admit to being a fan of Wikipedia, even while being aware of its limitations. (I have been burned by mainstream media enough to have become cynical about the limitations of just about every information source out there. As with anything, the consumer needs to take everything with a potential grain of salt.) Wikipedia is like a giant flea market of just about anything you ever did (or never thought about) fancying that you might want to know about. Published encyclopedias contain thoughtful articles on numerous topics of importance written by people who are presumably experts in the field they are writing about. But you're probably not going to find a synopsis for every season of the television series, The X-Files in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The problem with wikis is, they only seem to work well if they have an active, mature, and interested (better yet passionate) user base. Since they are a hodge-podge of user donated scraps and bits of information, many of them seem to be begging for a stronger organizational structure to make the useful information easy to get at. Also, without a largish active user base, the information seems to drift towards being outdated, as the original wiki creators and enthusiasts get bored and move on to other projects.

For library purposes, I'm guessing wikis work best for subjects with clearly defined informational content (e.g. a calendar of events) and several library staff people specifically assigned to keeping the wiki up to date. I'd like to think that you could have a wonderful library wiki for all users of the library, but the Curmudgeon is guessing that such a creature would either collapse under the weight of patron apathy, or would become the creature of a fanatical few.