Introduction
The introduction of blogs and wikis (user-edited, collaborative websites) has brought to fruition some of the earliest hopes for the internet – a democratic, accessible community of users responsible for its own content, supported by an open model of knowledge creation and communication. By supporting users who want to shape and share their content, while allowing other users access to the tools and means to modify the original contents, blogs and wikis continue to grow in utility. Their ease of setup and use adds thousands of new pages of information, opinion and observation to the worldwide web on a daily basis.
Evolving from open source and Usenet philosophies and community tenets, blogs and wikis represent the most current iteration of user-driven tools, resources and power. By understanding, harnessing and actively utilizing these emerging socially mediated tools, librarians can tap into a wealth of collective knowledge, as well as utilize these resources for their own communication, information and instruction needs.
The collaborative design of blogs (via the comments feature) and wikis (through the direct editing of content by users) allows a process of bottom up editing, where the expertise is not in the hands of the few, but rather emerges from the combined efforts of the many.
Blogs
Blogs are one of the easiest ways to set up a web page on the internet, taking a novice only a few minutes. This ease of set-up was incorporated by Blogger in 1999, and Blogger was bought out by Google in 2003, dramatically furthering its use. Since that time a number of other companies have been specializing in blog and blog-like products. This ease of set-up and use has made blogs the fastest growing area of the web, with a new blog created, on average, every second of every day. As the time of writing, blog search engine “Technorati” claims to track 44.3 million blogs and 2.5 billion links. Compare this to the fact that in March 2005, there were only around two million blogs worldwide. According to the most recent Pew Internet Survey, blog use now accounts for around 27 percent of all internet use. Blogs can incorporate text, images, audio and video, the latter known as vlogs, and are of three general types:
(1) aggregators that collect other blog postings and writings from various digital
media;
(2) personal narratives; and
(3) a synthesis of the two.
With the growth in popularity of blogs has come the equally rapid and unwelcome
growth of blog spam, known as splogs. This information “noise” either takes the form of junk comments, which for large and popular blogs often necessitates turning off the comment feature, or wholly junk blogs. Splogging is a real and growing problem, crowding the information byways with useless data that is designed to drive readers towards commercial sites. Blog engines have responded with various tactics, ranging from requiring non-machine readable verification before a comment can be posted to platform-specific filtering software such as WordPress’s Spam Karma.
Blog use
Blogs are represented across all academic and non-academic disciplines. Some
examples are librarians, journalists, scientists, political parties, and educators, as well as blogs responding to particular events, such as the Iraq war, the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. These blogs are used for intra-group communication, as well as for sharing information with users (in the case of librarians and scientists); for reporting ongoing events, often from within countries without the freedom of speech (in the case of journalists); for their asynchronous qualities, collaborative design and allowance for alternative communication styles (in the case of educators); for influencing voters and raising funds (in the case of political parties); and for givingv eyewitness reports, coordinating volunteer efforts, and making donations in war ravaged or devastated areas.
Wikis
Wikis offer the unique functionality of direct editing by readers, enabling the flexibility necessary to produce an authoritative, group-edited document and drawing on the power of multiple viewpoints and collaborative expertise. A wiki can be used in a classroom setting to build a collaborative document, tying together the many threads of research between students, or as a way to promote two way communications between users and librarians by having a library homepage “comments” wiki. Though this functionality is vulnerable to abuse and vandalism, the group ethos largely works to keep the living document in a credible state by continuous and scrupulous monitoring and correction, blocking of malicious users, or limiting access to registered users. Wikis are searchable on the worldwide web through specialized search engines such as Qwika (see www.qwika.com/), which currently searches 21,964,380 articles in 1,158
wikis, and many wikis have built in search functionality, such as the Wikipedia. Many sites offer free wiki hosting, such as ElWiki (see www.elwiki.com/) and Wikia (see www.wikia.com/wiki/Start_a_new_Wikia). Alternatively, a wiki engine can be purchased or freely downloaded and installed on a local server, allowing more control and customization but also requiring more technical expertise. Once a wiki is set up community guidelines and focus need to be written, as well as a licensing statement to ensure that all contributed writing is in the public domain. The final step is to publicize the wiki and to monitor the growth of your community and documents.
Conclusion-
These socially mediated tools are rich in potential for communication, information
sharing, and collaborative endeavors. Librarians and educators have little to lose by embracing and using blogs and wikis in their work and practice. They provide an excellent, interactive way to communicate, and they provide rich content, that explored with a critical eye, can yield information found no where else. Blogs and wikis engage users in ways that keep everyone involved and motivated.
The article was orginally written by Miguel Ramos and Paul S. Piper
