Comments on last class

I tried to look at some of the wiki-based programs for organizations, as were mentioned in our discussion about wikipedia, as I work in an organization and am always interested in ways of improving the sharing of information.   Unfortunately, they all seem to be paid sites.  SocialText looked interesting. It's a social intranet for a business or organization, enabling microblogging, people directories, etc. Although every organization I've worked in could use such a wiki, most organizations tend to continue to adhere to keeping the information to themselves.  I spent much of last year trying to put together a database of donors and contacts, thousands of them.  I was supposed to sit down with the director of this organization who kept all the information in his head, and didn't want to share.  It was an impossible task.  Even if "capturing the tacit information" is part of the organizational culture, all it takes is one person who refuses to turn that tacit information into explicit information.  The discussion of putting an "expert on a diskette" is ideal, but sadly, it's very difficult to do.

As we discussed Wikipedia again this past week, one thing that I'm not sure was mentioned is the concept of peer review within Wikipedia.  There is a strong element of peer review in everything that is put into Wiki.  Benkler in The Wealth of Networks emphasizes the use of peer review and accreditation in Slashdot, the leading technology newsletter on the Web, also created by thousands of users. Users comment on initial submissions, often reaching hundreds of comments.  It is the comments, or in essence, the "peer review" to the submissions that render the stories relevant.   The users are also rated according to good and bad comments.  Moderators also are assigned to provide accreditation to posts, and users can choose to see posts that are considered high quality posts.  I am reading another article about a site called Research Blogging, a collaborative blog on peer-reviewed scientific research, with the idea that by blogging about these articles, scholars are giving them accreditation, and also exposing this research to a much wider audience.


Although this wasn't specifically mentioned in class,  I very much enjoyed the reading by Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous.  He argues the prestigious Bettmann Archive of historic photographs is on the verge of being buried because of the way it's been catalogued, using an actual card catalogue of 11 million photographs.  While photographs are retrievable, it takes a number of days, and the information recorded about each photograph is very limited.  On the other hand, Weinberger discusses Corbis, which holds 4 million digital images.  Although smaller than the Bettman Archive, the digitalization of the photographs has enabled immediate retrieval and a much wider range of cataloguing these images.   He also mentions the concept of tagging photographs, which users on Flickr have done for the millions of photos uploaded to flickr.  Although tagging is a relatively simple act, it's another form of collaborative work that is helping people to organize and manage information.