Timely Snow

Here’s what I’m going to show them…Weblogs&Wikis.ppt

If I’d been more organized, I could have put this up here earlier and gotten feedback and suggestions.

On a positive note, I’ve upgraded WordPress to the new version 2.0.1, and it’s quite nice.

UPDATE: The talk went fairly well, I thought. Luckily, I shared the stage with Paul Resnick of the School of Information, who’s using a very interesting wiki/weblog hybrid based on the content management system Drupal. As I write this, I just remembered that I know his mother fairly well.

In preparing the talk, I spent some time thinking about why I’ve never gotten social, shared weblogs have never worked in a sustainable way. The are some exceptions in the world, notably Metafilter and the Volokh Conspiracy. I notice, though, now that I usually read weblogs through an aggregator, that I often find myself checking the small print to see which weblog an entry came from. I think this is because a key feature of weblogs is they have a definite “voice,” i.e., they present a perspective and need to be understood in terms of that perspective. In a shared weblog, you don’t know whose voice you’re hearing, and that can definitely impair communication.

Wikis also lack voice, which can be a strength and also a weakness. Cases where voice swamps message (such as entries on controversial topics) often don’t work well in Wikipedia, but at best it can represent a rough consensus of an interested community.

The other concept that I focused on was persona,  roughly defined as the version of your self you choose to represent on a weblog. Some personas wear better than others. This concept is also important in terms of the recurrent concerns about whether it’s a good idea for potential job seekers to have weblogs. I think the clear answer is, it depends. If you have a web persona that raises questions about your suitability for a particular job, you likely do have a problem. If that persona is one that reflects your values and beliefs, this is probably good news—it’s worse to get a job that doesn’t fit you (and vice versa) than not. At the same time, though, it is important to recognize that any weblog presents a persona, a selected version of the complexity of any individual, and there are probably some things it’s not necessary to share with the world.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 at 8:16 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.