Monday, 16 January 2012

Wikis and Blogs - Sharing Information

As stated by many others on the blackboard, there are many similarities between blogs and wikis as communication / collaborative models for sharing information. They both allow anyone with a web browser to publish content in an on line environment without knowledge of HTML, they both encourage others to contribute to the pool of information, both cover a broad range of topics - from news items to how to party with pet rocks, and both allow for the use of hyperlinking and referencing to back up information.

The differences between to two come down to (in my mind) the idea of ownership. A blog is owned by someone – whether it be a corporation or organisation or by a single person. As such the blog posts are written in a way that contains that entities knowledge and opinions. Others may comment on what is written but they may not edit the information directly. Comments may be ignored by the originating author or taken on board or merely deleted. The owner of the blog has control over the information that is presented.

In contrast to this Wikis are harder to control and not owned by any one particular person or organisation. Wikis merely present information, and organise it. Any one can start a new topic, or add to an existing one – therefore the information presented in wikis is constantly changing, history is always updating and never set in stone.

Wikipedia is one of the largest wikis and states that “The ideal Wikipedia article is balanced, neutral, and encyclopedic, containing notable verifiable knowledge” but this not always the case. There is nothing that prevents people from adding biased, non-neutral, unverifiable knowledge to this on line database, but there are people with vested interests in topics that will collaborate with each other, to try and verify information and improve its quality as seen in the article Wikipedia’s Rapid Reaction to Outburst During Obama Speech. Jimmy Wales (co-founder of Wikipedia) encourages people to quality test wikipedia documents, and to fix errors (TEDGlobal 2006) in order to ultimately improve his product.

Overall I think Wikipedia changes the way we communicate, as it encourages us to be critical of the information we receive whether it be in on line or offline environments. Wikis on a whole also encourage us to work together to create and contribute to an ever growing pool of knowledge – to be active participants in learning, teaching and sharing knowledge, not just blind consumers of it.

TEDGlobal. 2006. Jimmy Wales on the birth of Wikipedia. In TED Talks. online video. TED Ideas Worth Spreading.

Sunday, 15 January 2012

2.2: Wikis

This afternoon I added my expert knowledge to a pool of collective intelligence and became an encyclopedic author. . . So what did you get up to today?

In reality my expert knowledge concerned a character in a British rom/com TV show and my claims to encyclopedic authorship actually meant that I added a few words to a topic in Wikipedia. While Wikipedia is advertised as an "encyclopedia" it is also advertised as the one that "anyone can edit" (Welcome to Wikipedia 2012) - no credentials required, no university degrees needed, no expertise - you don't even need to give your name, so hold your applause people.

In fact altering information on Wikipedia is surprisingly easy -after reading a few instructions on the Tutorial/Editing page I was ready to bestow my head full of random facts on a world wide audience. The problem I found was not in the web publishing (wikis by design are user friendly - utilising a combination of wysiwyg software and a few basic commands known as wikitext enables budding authors like myself publish on line without knowledge of HTML (Leaver 2011)). The problem was with finding a topic that nobody else had already written about.

So why do people volunteer their time to write wikipedia posts in the first place? (when they arent required to do so for university).

A report on The Quality of Open Source Production states that who people that contribute Wikipedia do so in different ways. Some become members and publish under their names or pseudonyms and do so in order to:

contribute to a community,
to gain status within the community by publishing quality information often

Others contribute anonymously, on rare occasion and do so in order to:

part with some expert knowledge in a particular field
fix errors

(Anthony, Smith, and Williamson 2007)

Therefore the combination of experts, error fixers and "people who like to write encyclopedias for the fun" (TEDGlobal 2006) means that Wikipedia is on par with your traditionally and "expertly" authored encyclopedia such as Encyclopedia Britannica. Neither are infallible, nor 100% correct but one is not more correct than the other despite the differences in the way information is collected. Both operate under a system of referencing sources which should be substantiated before using in an academic context such as an essay (Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia 2012).

As status within the encyclopedic writers world was not something Ive ever really dreamt about at night, and my current incarnation as a student renders me (for now) expertise-less (in the academic sense) ... my task was to search for errors or information gaps in a very niche (some would say trivial) market that I knew allot about .. TV. Study in a previous university unit had me set up a blog about television show of which I now know every detail - from plot to character development to script. Gavin and Stacey it seems, is my area of expertise.

I found a topic about one of the characters (Nessa Jenkins) that was missing a bit of information and added the following text to Romantic links part of the biography section:

"Nigel Havers, Mohamed Al-Fayed (who tried to set her up with his son), and two of Gladys Knights Pips (whom she woke up in bed with in Vegas)^[1]"

Wikipedia requires that all info is verifiable and therefore should be referenced back to a "reliable source" (Wikipedia:Verifiability 2012). This is where a little more experimentation began, as I referenced my entry back to the blog I created for the assignment (Nessa's A-Z) and wondered if it would be good enough as an encyclopedic reference.

The only thing to do now was to wait and see if any changes would be made to my entry. As Wikipedia posts can be changed by anyone it was possible that the information I had added to the wiki would deleted or altered in some way. People passionate about certain topics can add wikipedia posts to watch lists and monitor the information that's added, changing it within seconds if they see fit. These changes can be viewed via the View History tab which I checked religiously over the course of the day with no changes made.

Four days later I revisited the page to find the information I added was still in tact and was feeling pretty smug that my little piece of trivial information was being accepted by the wikipedian Gavin and Stacey loving community. This was until I tested the link I added to the reference section, (the one that pointed back to my blog) and found it was not working. I had entered the address incorrectly. So it seems I was mistaken when I thought I had been accepted into the wikipedian authorship community and it was more the case that the info that I added has not been checked. No body picked up the broken link, therefore nobody is watching the Nessa Jenkins wikipedian entry... The cloud of smugness lifted... Lucky I didn't care about it anyway . . .

Anthony, D., S. W. Smith, and T. Williamson. 2007. The Quality of Open Source Production:

Zealots and Good Samaritans in the Case of Wikipedia. Dartmouth College. www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR2007-606.pdf (accessed 11/1/12).

Leaver, D. T. 2011. Wikis. http://dbs.ilectures.curtin.edu.au/lectopia/casterframe.lasso?fid=691872&cnt=true&usr=not-indicated&name=not-indicated (accessed 11/1/12).

TEDGlobal. 2006. Jimmy Wales on the birth of Wikipedia. In TED Talks. online video. TED Ideas Worth Spreading.

Welcome to Wikipedia. 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 11/1/12).

Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia. 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wikipedia (accessed 11/1/12).

Wikipedia:Verifiability. 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability (accessed 15/1/12).

Wednesday, 4 January 2012

Blogging

Rebecca Blood – Author of Weblogs: a history and perspective notes the origins of blogging with Jesse James Garrett and Cameron Barrett who compiled a list of the very first weblogs, coming to the grand total of 23 at the beginning of 1999. From the creation of an online directory sprang a community of bloggers who’s numbers began to rise as blogging became more popular. With more and more Weblogs being created, bloggers began to compile their own lists of the weblogs they liked. Brigitte Easton compiled the “most complete listing … available” (Blood 2000) at the time which she based upon a selection criteria that ended up defining a weblog. It was a “site that consist(s) if dated entries”(Blood 2000). By August 1999 the first “free build-your-own-weblog tool was launched” named Pitas followed by the release of Blogger and due to their ease of use, (they eliminated the need for the knowledge of html coding in order to publish on the web) the popularity of blogging skyrocketed (Blood 2000).

This description of early day blogs bears some similar features to the ones listed in Dr Tama Leavers lecture regarding blogging:

Terminology	Leaver (current day viewpoint)	Blood (historical viewpoint)
Blog	“a collection of entries” (Leaver 2011)	“site that consist(s) if dated entries” (Blood 2000)
Blog Post	Individual Entry	A dated entry
Blog Roll	A list of links that “positions a blog as a part of a community” (Leaver 2011)	A list of links to other weblogs that worked as the very basis of the blogging community.

A look at my one of my favourite blog sites Web designer Depot finds that these three criteria are met. The blog is made up of individual dated posts and a list of links to other blogs can be found in the right hand column under the advertisements.

Blood goes on to describe blogs as “link-driven sites” that contain “commentary” from the blogger and as such are referred to as “filters” (Blood 2000) of information on specific topics. Bloggers can compile posts full of links to information on specific topics from all over the web, therefore potentially exposing blog readers to new sources of information, sometimes away from the mainstream. As the internet is an unregulated space, blogs are varied in topic and theme and allow anybody with an internet connection to “contribute” and “participate in media” (Blood 2000). As such the commentaries presented in blogs can be accurate or inaccurate, from a personal viewpoint or a more general one, could compare sources of information on a particular topic, or reveal inconsistencies in the way information is presented to the public (Leaver 2011). This type of online surveillance keeping is what Leaver referred to in the lecture as Gate watching – where bloggers keep news media companies in check by critiquing their journalistic standards (Leaver 2011).

Finally Blood expresses her personal experience with blogging as an empowering one where she discovered her own interests and began to value her own point of view. For Blood the experience of airing her opinions in a public environment enabled her to see the importance of an individual perspective vs. a perspective of traditional conglomerates who disseminate information from a top down model of communication.

Leaver also mentioned a few other elements of current day blogs that I thought were worth remembering:

	(Leaver 2011)
Comments	Invites people participate with the blogger and surrounding community and add to the post
Trackback	A function that notifies a blogger that another blogger has linked to their post. They in turn can link back (links are good for SEO)
Theme	AKA Skin – it’s the design of the blog
Feed	AKA RSS allows for syndication
Podcasts and Video Blogs	Are also considered blogs, today blogs are not just text based

Blood, R. 2000. weblogs: a history and perspective. http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html (accessed 3/1/12).

Leaver, D. T. 2011. Blogs. http://dbs.ilectures.curtin.edu.au/lectopia/casterframe.lasso?fid=691872&cnt=true&usr=not-indicated&name=not-indicated (accessed 3/1/12).

Topic 1.1 What is the Internet. 2011. http://lms.curtin.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_id=_2_1&url=%2fwebapps%2fblackboard%2fexecute%2flauncher%3ftype%3dCourse%26id%3d_40430_1%26url%3d (accessed 15/12/11).

Tuesday, 3 January 2012

Now that blogging is over a decade old, to what extent have early predictions come true?

Back in the year 2000 Rebecca Blood wrote “I strongly believe in the power of weblogs to transform both writers and readers from "audience" to "public" and from "consumer" to "creator." “ (Blood 2000). Her wish, desire or prediction for blogging was that it would raise challenge to the “effects of a media saturated culture” (Blood 2000) by giving anyone with access to a web browser the ability to voice their opinions, share their knowledge and uniqueness to with a public audience, to start a conversation, to create, “communicate and connect” (Blood 2000).

Has this happened?

I think its fair to say that there is no cut and dry yes or no answer to this question:

Leaning on the side of YES are the following points:

Anyone with access to a web browser and who has basic computer / web literacies can start a blog – consumers becoming creators of media
People can form communities via blogs but also via other forms of social media developed since the time of writing such as twitter or Facebook
Blogs exist within an online public forum that audiences can contribute to (via comments etc)
Today there are many different forms of blogging (such as video blogging etc) that enable people to create, share and discuss content

Verging on the side of No are the following points:

Not everyone can contribute. Approximately only 30% of the worlds population have access to the internet (World Internet Usage and Population Statistics 2011), that leaves 70% without access to the “public voice”
Of that 30% - 53.3% of bloggers fall in the age categories of 21 -35 years. Only 7.1% of all bloggers are in the 51+ age group (Blogger Demographics: Who is responsible for the majority of blog content? 2010) – That’s a lot of internet users whose valuable opinions, knowledge and perspectives are not added to the mix.
Not all blogs challenge a media saturated culture – a good many blogs are owned by media conglomerates, a great many more are filled with advertising, not to mention the sites that sell our information to others.
The ways in which we express ourselves online are censored by media industries (E.G. using your favorite song in the background of your video blog could get you sued). Furthermore in some countries (such as China) firewalls prevent access to information and free speech against political figures is very much discouraged.

So while we have hit the mark in some places, I tend to agree with Gail that the initial predictions about blogging were somewhat utopian. There are a great deal of issues regarding the freedom to communicate on a public platform that go beyond the technological, that could not have been predicted in the early stages of the blogging.

Blogger Demographics: Who is responsible for the majority of blog content? 2010. http://socialmediatoday.com/SMC/204370 (accessed 4/1/12).

Blood, R. 2000. weblogs: a history and perspective. http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html (accessed 3/1/12).

World Internet Usage and Population Statistics. 2011. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm (accessed 3/10/11).

How far are blogs and journalism dependent on each other? What would you say are the consequences of this link?

News in the traditional sense is a commodity traded for profit by those who have control over its distribution.

The role of the free press as the fourth estate of democracy is to keep a watchful eye over those in charge (e.g. government and the judiciary) and keep the general public informed of their actions (Harlow 2011) but news is also a business. If the general public are no longer interested in a story it is no longer saleable. Therefore the gatekeepers of information (e.g. newspaper editors) may choose not to invest money into their journalists researching these stories, no matter their importance to the community or democracy too for that matter.

This reminds me of the analogy James Surowiecki gave in his Ted Talk on social media and news – of the ants following the ants in a circle (TEDtalksDirector 2008). Although Surowiecki was referring only to blogging and social media communities, his analogy can just as easily be applied to that of traditional media forms - where the only news items reported are the ones the general public have an interest in, and the general public only have an interest in the news items reported.

Blogging therefore could be seen as the rogue ant to the journalistic circle but is probably better articulated by Granovetters theory of the “ weak ties” (Rettberg 2008) where someone who is not strongly embedded within a particular community has the ability to bring new information. This can be seen in example of Salam Pax blogging from an insider’s view during the invasion of American troops in Iraq, and Russ Kicks publishing images of coffins of deceased American servicemen on his blog in 2004 (Leaver 2011). At the time the general public did not have access to this information through traditional media. They may not have known they wanted access to this information but once they had seen it, they realized its importance which in turn prompted traditional media outlets to report it too.

Therefore I believe that one of the consequences of blogs on journalism is that they have and will continue to, loosen the grip that the traditional gatekeepers of information have over published content. Blogs and citizen journalists bring new information, new ideas and new viewpoints into the public domain, which can be investigated by traditional journalists. If popular enough these stories may be published by traditional media in online and offline environments and communicated to an even wider audience.