Module 2 and my journey so far.

On Friday I felt like I was banging my head against a wall and just not getting this subject. You see I am not really into social networking and I just don't see the point of it.

I was also struggling to come up with a suitable project for my major assignment. 

So, I phoned Jake. He is just divine. He was patient with me and he helped me understand social networking a bit better and he said that it was ok I wasn't head over heels in love with facebook, twitter etc and it was good to evaluate these tools critically. I think it was at that point that I had a lightbulb moment in beginning to understand social networking. I feel privileged to be completing this subject and to have such a patient instructor in Jake.

So, moving right along into module 2.................

Blogs

A blog is short for web log and provides an easy platform for web publishing.

Microblogging is gaining in popularity with Twitter being the primary site..

Wikis

A wiki is an online space which can be jointly edited by a number of contributors.

Wikipedia is the most famous example of the wiki.

In a Sydney Morning Herald interview with encyclopedia Britannica president he appears to have sour grapes that Google ranks wikipedia above his encyclopedia in its search engine. He was not very positive about his views and to me it just looks like a case of sour grapes.

Tagging

Tagging is the application to an online resource of a word or phrase as descriptive metadata.

Folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for one's own retrieval. The tagging is done in a social environment (usually shared and open to others). Folksonomy is created from the act of tagging by the person consuming the information. (Source: http://www.vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html)

We were asked to think about  what value a user-generated folksonomy offers in comparison with a taxonomy designed by information professionals.
Well I'm not sure what value it would have apart from being a quick and easy method because as Rosenfold(2005)  correctly points out, when there are only a few items tagged under a title it is a great way to locate things like photos, but when there are thousands under the same tag it isn't quite as easy to find the relevant photo. He also suggests that they don't support searching very well.
Overall quite an interesting piece of writing.


Delicious

Well I have just started an account with Delicious (I think).

It was extremely easy to do and was able to be done through facebook.

I am really impressed and I am going to start saving my readings etc to this site so that if the computer breaks down I won't lose everything that I have saved again like I did the last time.

Very impressive. I can't wait to start using it.

Once I have this thing up and running I think that I will come back and complete the online learning task for assignment 2.