Kansas State University’s Digital Ethnography group — “a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography” — posted this visual explanation of Web 2.0. It’s by Michael Wesh, assistant professor of cultural anthropology, and it rocks.
Text is unilinear…when written on paper.
Digital text is different.
Hypertext [...]

Posted February 7, 2007 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: cultural anthropology, digital ethnography, future of the web, kansas state university, Michael Wesh, semantic web, video, visual explanation, web 2.0, wisdom of crowds. 3 Comments.

Bob Garlitz, who’s trying to decide between blogging at Typepad and Blogspot, wrote to offer a somewhat older phrase for the success of social software as described in The Wisdom of Crowds and in the definition of collabulary: “the ignorant perfection of ordinary people.”
Bob is at a loss to identify the source (and it pre-dates [...]

Posted March 9, 2006 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information. Tags: collabulary, folksonomy, ignorant perfection, ordinary people, social software, the ignorant perfection of ordinary people, The Wisdom of Crowds, wisdom of crowds. One Comment.

Fresh from Nature: a peer reveiw comparison of Wikipedia’s science coverage against Encyclopaedia Britannica:
One of the extraordinary stories of the Internet age is that of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. This radical and rapidly growing publication, which includes close to 4 million entries, is now a much-used resource. But it is [...]

Posted December 14, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information. Tags: Britannica, compare, comparison, Encyclopaedia Britannica, encyclopedia, head to head, journal, nature, peer review, quality, social software, thewisdom of the crowds, wikipedia, wisdom of crowds. One Comment.