WIkis

Wikis are simply amazing. My mind is racing thinking that wikis have a huge amount of potential. In terms of library tool, I believe that wikis are the electronic equivalent of sliced bread. This seems like high praise, but thinking back to the early 80s where one used basic to create meager text programs and fast forwarding to grad school where we used pico for web development, wikis seem light years away from these historic, stone age innovations.

The closest I can come to what a wiki means to me is simply that you can create your own personal intranet where you can have a webpage, have downloads and create your own database where you can create the ideal keyword searching.

Each week does build on the previous week, however this week seems especially enlightening since wikis seem to combine a lot of the social networking goals all at once, specifically group sharing, the innovation of group efforts to create more than what one person can often do. This is what collaboration in group projects should be. Everyone is sharing but evolving the project without harming or hampering the rest of the wiki.

I was thinking about how it could be used at the Bevevino library and the revitalizing of a Business wiki as opposed to a business pathfinder is quite envigorating. I also thought how wikis could be used for the new and existing Hoyt Library. What is great about wikis, among many other things, is that wikis thrive on a small topic but can create relevant pathfinders to the end user from the building blocks of information already input into the wiki. It is quite impressive.


What I would love to see with wikis is the ability to have wiki technology spread to revitalize static websites and make everyone more interactive with each other in contributing information not just on grassroot sites or personal intranets but on professional sites. Some of that is manifesting itself quite a bit with blogs attached to news stories, but using wikis could greatly improve the searching and feedback mechanism for news stories. The possibilities do seem quite infinite and wikis are a terminal (at this point in time) product of collaboration, file sharing, information seeking and sharing and most of all fostering a sense of community for a common purpose with the sole outcome of providing the best information on a topic that a group can prepare and publish.

RSS Feeds

While working on our assignment recently, I thought quite a bit about the concept of RSS feeds, specifically, how the information is delivered to our desktops, laptops, and other devices whenever we specify and in what form we want the information packaged. This delivery of information is vastly different that print media that is delivered via the mail or picked up at a newstand. Sure, the information age and the Internet are credited with this electronic delivery of information, however never have we been able to create our own newspapers and magazines with such ease.

Information is spoon fed to us, however we are both the spooner and the consumer. I wonder how the business paradigm for news and information delivery will cope with this method of information. In a world where people can access a similar level of quality of news and information from around the world, will homogeneity become the norm as each traditional delivery of daily news ( i.e. newspapers and feeds) no longer see the value of differentiating in reporting? The reason being that the news coverage is too shallow since sparseness is emphasized due to the ephemeral relevancy of the news bite or topic at hand?

RSS feeds also bring us together into a true commuity. We can be as current and as "inside" on a topic as we want. We can create clubs, blogs, groups and agendas based upon similar interests and likes, or we can silently or quiety observe others regarding these topics.

The future of RSS feeds ( and its concept) will definitely be in how to hone the searching and relevancy of the search string set up and how to archive and preserve the digital news stories that were once preserved with microfilm.

I remember being in library school and visiting the National Archives, there were seven track tapes but few seven track players to play them on to extract the data. As we migrate to different types of internet script (HTML, to XTML, etc.) how will we preserve these precious and unique news gathering settings? There should be a digital archive, but what will be the definitive one?

For now, RSS and other feeds remain an efficient and effective means to gather breadth and depth on a particular topic or issue. The ability to be seeped in a particular topic was never so easy, immediate and accessible as it is today.