ASIS&T Annual Meeting Blog

Vitrual Communities and Social Networks

November 7th, 2006 david.talley

Or, Why EVERYONE Should Blog.
I enjoyed the Monday session a great deal. It combined input from a diverse range of experience with user-created content to sketch an outline of how the web might record and share individual experience with minimal intrusion by the technology. A couple of thoughts:

Dare we hope for a successor to the ugly little word blog? Like any jargon, it has conferred a little in-group cachet to those who toss it around, but also like any jargon, it acts as a barrier. Deborah Swain lamented that approval for her project was complicated because her administrators didn’t even know what the word meant.

The long-time bloggers on Live Journal, Blogger.com, and similar sites probably like that situation just fine. I’m projecting here, but I suspect that the boundary of awareness & familiarity helps to give the webspace a homey feel to users. But if the practice of recording one’s own experience in an online forum is to become common, that barrier will need to fall or at least shrink.

Maybe abandoning that shibboleth, blog, might be a first step.

Entry Filed under: ASIST2006