Activity One - Mucking about with Wikitext

Editing a wiki is amazingly simple. After using Wikipedia's tutorial sandbox to experiment I found linking between Wikipedia articles very simple. You don't even have to know the URL. Both the links I created pointed at existing wikis.

My experimental Wikitext:

{{Please leave this line alone (tutorial sandbox heading)}}
<!-- Hello!  Feel free to try your formatting and editing skills below this line.  As this page is for editing experiments, this page will automatically be cleaned every 12 hours. -->

== Heading 1 ==
=== Heading 2 ===
[[Typography]] is an important part of [[web design]].

The result:

Typography links to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography and web design to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_design. I found if you enter a non-existent document as a URL on Wikipedia you are asked if you would like to create it.

Readings

The Quality of Open Source Production: Zealots and Good Samaritans in the Case of Wikipedia

I have often heard that Wikipedia is a untrustworthy source of information, but I don't think that is entirely true. As this article says there are many 'Zealots' and 'Good Samaritans' who quickly find errors and graffiti on a page. Of course you can't fully rely on Wikipedia as there is going to be mistakes here and there, but it is a good place to start and I often use the references it provides as a guide to where to look.

Introduction

I've haven't really got into blogging myself (yet) and never thought of it as social networking. This topic changed my concept that the majority of bloggers are people with too much time on their hands and showed me that it's a way to make friends with similar interests online. Personally I prefer 'real' friends that I talk to outside of cyberspace, but for those that may live in an area away from people with the same passions and beliefs I can see blogging as a great alternative. Even though you may never meet any of them outside of the Internet, these online groups can bring a sense of community and belonging. Well, those are my thoughts on the course work anyway.

Activity One - Discussion

"The early days of blogging were extremely optimistic about the potential of blogs to give everyone who wanted one a voice and a venue to publish. Now that blogging is over a decade old, to what extent have these early predictions come true?"

It is certainly true that people with uncensored Internet access now have an easy avenue for sharing their opinions and raising issues others may never of know about. However those without access to or censored Internet access are still restricted in publishing content easily.

Sky mentions language and literacy skills another limitation:

"It's important to remember that some people still don't have access to the Internet, or to the skills necessary to communicate online (such as literacy). In some cases, people may have access to the Internet and be literate, but not in a language that they can use effectively online.

If you're interested in this question, it might be useful to look for recent research on 'the digital divide'."

So the answer is technically no, but it sure comes close.

"Rettberg talks about blogs facilitating ‘distributed conversations’ and even ‘distributed communities’; what do you understand these terms to mean?"

Distributed conversations: To me distributed conversations are where every participant has an equal voice. Blog readers are limited to comments that are moderated by the blogger; even then they are at the bottom of the page and that's not exactly equal.

Distributed communities: Communities between blogs and bloggers most definitely exist, but each node is not equal. Like in off-line society some people are more popular and powerful. Bloggers that have more inward links or readers have their opinion more respected.

Activity One - Newsflash!

My thoughts on RSS:

RSS is more of a standard of software communication than a specific technology. It provides a method to publish updates of various elements on a website in a form readable by many different types of software. I think the key to its importance is in interoperability between website and web services, desktop applications and other websites. Take the blogroll on this site for example: without RSS the software that runs my blog, BlogEngine.NET, wouldn't be able to fetch the latest articles on similar blogs and provide them to my readers, and vice versa.

Readings

What Is Web 2.0 Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software

I was discussing this topic with a friend in America. He agrees with me that Web 2.0 is just a buzz word applied to the evolution of the Web and the popularity of social networking sites. Web developers shouldn't be trying to make their sites Web 2.0 because it's cool, but look at their target audience for inspiration. Just because something is popular doesn't make it right for everyone. If a website doesn't offer user contributions or collaboration does that mean it's in the stone ages and people won't visit? Absolutely not. Applying version numbers such as Web 1.0 to 2.0 to websites to define their success is like stereotyping designers as nerds because they use a computer for their work; (I use that example from my own experience).

Another misconception is popularity. A website's popularity doesn't define if it's a success either; for many it does but not all. Every website on the Web should have a goal deeper than traffic. A web page can receive a lot of traffic yet not be efficient at it's underlying goal. Bringing in customers and business is the target for most small to medium business websites and if the visitors are coming from an unrelated search term or other source the turnover and effectiveness for the site is not there.

Someone's personal website for sharing thoughts, opinions and information with friends and family. An independent contractor's site as an information source for interested employers. An academics web page as a teaching resource. All of these forms of online media do not necessarily need to be Web 2.0 or popular to be a success.

The Wisdom of the Chaperones: Digg, Wikipedia, and the Myth of Web 2.0 democracy

I agree with this article. Digg has members who are very influential and control the majority of content. When I tried it I found the experience very down putting. I remember someone or myself saying "This place is full of arrogant (people) who are all trying to one up each other".

The valid contributions get buried under a pile of duplicate entries and crude jokes made by power users all trying to be on top. I quickly found the articles appearing on top to be a waste of time and stopped bothering to read them or use Digg at all.

Activity Two - Creating a Delicious Account

I like the idea behind Delicious, but I haven't found I really use it. I prefer to use the bookmarking functionality provided by Firefox with the help of Read It Later; an add-on for creating temporary bookmarks for pages that interest you yet would rather read later.