Comments on: What is Web 2.0?

By: Front Row

Front Row — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:58:34 +0000

@Name Our question was based on the examples provided in class – it seems as though what many academics are building are blogs that act as portals. Surely one can click on any of these for full text, but our assumption, perhaps wrong, is that most internet users keep moving. Like sharks.

By: Name

Name — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:57:27 +0000

@Front Row about sementic web:
There are ways in which they are trying to standardize the sementic web via specific ontologies, metadata with key phrases like “is a” or “created by” There are ways, they’re just not very widely spread yet.

By: Gabriel Bodard

Gabriel Bodard — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:57:16 +0000

@Name: re wikis: thank you! I think responsibility is a key concept here. It is easy to criticize (e.g. Wikipedia) as a poorly researched source of information, but if you know enough to be able to make that critique, you ought to be improving it. All scholars should, as I argued, be prepared to play a role in society as well as in the academy.

By: Irene, Isabel, Paola

Irene, Isabel, Paola — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:55:40 +0000

Positives of Web 2.0 for scholars:
- Wide audience, aopen access/source
- High exposure for publication.
- Engaging with public.
- Student communication and interaction.
-Instant feedback from peers.

Responsibilities, ‘service’:
- Correcting Wiki.
- Raising standards of e-publication.
- Keeping up to date with blogs, reading and contribution.

Negatives:
- Takes time to keep up with abundance of sites.
- Online publication not respected.
- Quality not guaranteed with free publication.

By: Gabriel Bodard

Gabriel Bodard — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:54:58 +0000

@Front Row: re Semantic Web: unless you have an intelligent enough aggregation tool to interpret the non-standardized linking information into some kind of coherent pattern. (But then, I suppose, we’re back to the “dumb links” model, so we haven’t gained much…)

By: Name

Name — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:54:46 +0000

@Bodard:
How is this different than normal publishing? Is it then the weakness of acedemia?

By: Gabriel Bodard

Gabriel Bodard — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:53:20 +0000

@Front Row: I’m sure a lot of blogs are far more valuable to the writer than to anybody else. Is that a weakness?

By: Front Row

Front Row — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:53:00 +0000

If the semantic web is a way of linking information via relationships, how do you standardize the language so it’s accessible to the basic user? It would seem necessary in order to build from the bottom-up.

By: Name

Name — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:52:09 +0000

@Front Row:
It depends on different people and their motives. One can make announcements via microblogs and full text articles on larger blogs. We just have a more fluid way of publishing things rather than going through publishers etc. It’s more flexible. It doesn’t really have anything to do with attention spans.

By: Gabriel Bodard

Gabriel Bodard — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:52:03 +0000

@Simon Mahony: my slides number #22-23 in the presentation linked above tried to define this concept.