kanye…the best, i guess.

For anyone who’s into popular music at all, it’s no secret that Kanye West really likes himself, especially since his mother died. Kanye was all over this years Grammy Awards, complete with an oddly inappropriate a capella song for his dead mother.

One of my highlights was a complete surprise to me when it happened. It started out as a classic Grammys moment, Vince Gill wins an award (like he does nearly every year). I prepared myself for a rather dry and boring Vince speech, but this year, good ol’ Vince must’ve had something to drink before hand, as he unleashed this epic line:

I was completely amazed. Kanye must’ve been getting on everyone’s nerves that night, since there were a couple other Kanye zingers thrown out. I’ve said it before, and I’ll for sure say it again: Kanye’s definitely not the best there ever was. If anything, The Beatles were.

i’ll probably be referencing this a lot

The more I think about the Web 2.0 movement, the more nervous and scared I get. I read this book once, entitle The Cult of the Amateur. Essentially the book is a former Web 2.0 insiders view on the negative possibilities of the movement. It’s quite a compelling read, and I suggest it to anyone, internet junkie or not.

Here’s a bit from the first chapter of the book:

Look at Wikipedia, the Internet’s largest cathedral of knowledge. Unlike editors at a professional encyclopedia like Britannica, the identity of the volunteer editors on Wikipedia is unknown. These citizen editors out-edit other citizen editors in defining, redefining, and then reredefining truth, sometimes hundreds of time a day. Take, for example, July 5, 2006, the day Enron embezzler Ken Lay died. At 10:06 A.M. that day, the Wikipedia entry of Ken Lay said he died of an “apparent suicide.” Two minutes later, it said the cause of death was an “apparent heart attack.” Then at 10:11 A.M., Wikipedia reported that the “guilt of ruining so many lives finally led him to his suicide.” At 10:12 A.M., we were back to the massive coronary causing Lay’s demise.

One problem with websites like Wikipedia is the lack of credible journalism. The sources of information, if any, are most likely other blogs, and if there is a legitimate source, bloggers tend to either steal the content and not quote the source, or they do cite the source properly, but it’s still simply a repost. This calls into question: what’s the point of a blog?

Most blogs that are popular are news-related blogs. These blogs get their information from established, credible news sources, like The New York Times. The problem is that these blogs, while reposting these news items and spreading them to a degree, are not helping out the source at all. In fact, they are stealing the information from the source in a sense. Lots of people get their news from blogs, and they do not realize where the blogger got the information. Also, blogs had led to a decrease in readers for their sources. So what happens when bloggers have sucked all of the life out of their sources, and the sources have to quit or change dramatically? Read the book.

credibility

In our text, The Blogging Book, by Aliza Risdahl, it is said in chapter 2:

Look closely at blogs you are visiting for research. Can you identify who is behind them? What proof do you have that the creators are reputable?

What a very simple, and surprisingly not obvious enough, bit of advice from the author. I feel it is far to common for people online to use blog, wikis, and other sources of free and public-editable content as sources for their information. It is more common that not, in some cases, for today’s college and high school students to use Wikipedia as a source for information regarding a research topic. This is strongly frowned upon by many universities. In fact, some universities will give failing grades to students who use these sorts of sources. I think this is a very important point. Blogs and wikis are generally good sources for information that is simple, or easy enough for a very general description to suffice.

k.

Hello. This is a weblog for my Weblogs and Wikis course. It sould be a pretty nifty time. Hope all is well with everybody, and I hope you enjoy this weblog.