JOMC 191.3 Blogging, We the Media and Virtual Communities

Carrying on from Karen’s post earlier in the week, after discovering some libelous and false information posted on the site, Wikipedia has decided to tighten its rules for posting. It’s interesting especially considering Jimmy Wale’s discussion with us earlier this semester and his view that loose posting guidelines were beneficial to community building.

-dan

This probably could be a comment to the original post, but I felt it was going to cover enough new ground to deserve its own post. Discussion on the library listserves about Seigenthaler’s article in USA Today continues. It has become a heated debate on at a few listservs.

People are using it to discuss blogs as well. They brough up an article called Attack of the Blogs, that was published in Forbes on Nov. 14. I don’t think we have discussed that yet. On the first page of that article, Daniel Lyons, basically attacks blogs as slander machines. It is long, so I haven’t made it to the other 3 pages yet. Karen G. Schneider, then points to a blog entry of hers where an open letter in response to Forbes has been published. The letter was written by the Internet Press Guild.

This article in the Onion was also posted as comic relief. This article jokes about the idea of a wiki-constitution. As someone who has published a copy of the constitution, Michael S. Hart, of Project Gutenberg, then pointed out that even the original copies of the constiution differ from one another.

p.s. I also noted on Karen’s blog an entry about Leslie Burger, President of the ALA’s, return to blogging. She got this from an entry on tametheweb. They both pointed to this entry about Leslie’s visit to UNC-Chapel Hill. Free press about our event. No one noticed when Leslie posted it to her website, but her blog, and lots of people now know.

Rather than make a really long repost of what’s on my blog, Ed Cone’s and Sue Polinsky’s, let me point you to the article on my blog.
The gist: News and Record asked both Sue and Michael Skube, Pulitizer winner and Elon prof, to write a bit about blogs — pro and con. Skube’s article excoriates blog (supposedly it’s not on-line), but he admits not being familiar with blogs or bloggers at all. Not having even read one he can recall. Ed calls him to task, then calls him to discuss the article.

Seems as if Microsoft can’t keep there hands off of any market, from CNN:

SEATTLE, Washington (AP) — Microsoft is developing an online classified service to compete with the likes of Craigslist and becoming the latest company to capitalize on growing consumer interest in buying and selling everything from cars to baby-sitting services on the Web.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/12/02/microsoft.classified.ap/index.html