dillon's blog

The realm of media sharing is so large, and the possibilities so great,
it would be impossible to do it justice in a single week. After all, the
Internet, even the old text-based, Web 1.0 Internet, was about media
sharing (mostly in the form of text). With the advent of sites like
Flickr and Youtube, the technical barriers to sharing wide varieties of
media have been removed. But it doesn't end with video and photos -
Googledocs, slideshare and scribd all provide new ways for users to share
media.

My first thought this week is that Kroski's
article is amazing. As I was reading through the positive points about folksonomies and tagging, I kept thinking, "Yes, but...", and then when I got to the latter part of the piece, most of my objections were accounted for.

Hi everyone,

I'm on physical vacation to Ithaca, NY this weekend, so I'm also going to be on vacation online.  See you next week!

I've never really understood the controversy over wikis, and I've always been inclined to view the controversy as more of a generational misunderstanding. My mother, after seeing Andrew Keen speak at OLA conference, insisted that I read his book, The Cult of the Amateur: how today's Internet is killing our culture. But the
element of his message that she found most horrifying, that young people are

Because I had so much to say this week, I've divided up my main blog post and my review of the case studies into two postings:

Case Studies:

Since I took one of my one-week vacations from blogging last week, I'll mention a little on RSS in general at the same time before looking at this week's readings. Like a number of other people have posted, I always thought of RSS as something that was potentially interesting, but before this course I had never gotten around to setting up a reader. The few times that I had clicked on RSS feeds in the past, I ended up with some folder in my Firefox browser that I didn't know what to do with. Since getting Google Reader set up, I'm much more excited about RSS feeds.

It was interesting for me to see how ethical concerns have come to the forefront in discussions of blogging. I think this demonstrates the growing maturity of blogs, and the attendant authority that blogs have gained. Traditional media may try to distance themselves from "amateur" blogs, but they are increasingly turning to them for content and leads. Anyone who listens to commercial radio can hear how much producers and on-air personalities depend on blogs for content (particularly blogs about celebrities).

My first exposure to blogs didn't happen until they emerged as a story covered by traditional media. At that time, my impression was that blogs were largely forums for self-indulgence (and if my memory serves right, this was how they were often depicted in the stories that wrote about blogs as an emerging trend). Rebecca Blood's article suggests that this impression might actually have reflected the predominant mode of blogging at that time. I know that I was quite content to ignore blogs, blogging and bloggers.