I'll show you mine, if you show me yours! Thoughts on social networking...

I just climbed down from last week's soapbox, and I'm trying desperately to prevent myself from climbing right back up while discussing this week's theme of social networking sites.

But really, I think the same things attracts us to both social networking sites like Facebook, and freely-edited content sites like Wikipedia: we all want our chance to be heard, to see and be seen, to connect or re-connect with others. I've come to the conclusion that we're all voyeurs and exhibitionists to varying degrees!

I've been a Facebook participant for three years, and as with any new technology that I embrace (such as blogging!), I was seriously addicted for the first while. I was excited to fill in my info tab with what I consider to be interesting tidbits about myself, couldn't wait to create photo albums of my adventures - guess that's the exhibitionist part. And I was hoping to find or be found by some long lost friends. This was tempered by my concerns about security and privacy, and second thoughts about what exactly I wanted other people to know about me. Am I being completely honest, genuinely myself, or am I creating a persona to present to the social networking world?

The answer to that question is...it depends. I feel completely comfortable posting almost anything with some of my FB friends. But with others, I feel more compelled to edit or censor myself. I fight this urge, but it's undeniably there. Perhaps this is due to the fact that my FB friends cover a wide range of political, environmental, social and religious views, and I'm loath to offend anyone.

I've noticed an interesting phenomenon on Facebook. I've managed to re-connect with friends and relatives that I haven't seen or corresponded with for 25-30 years! At first, there's a flurry of emails flying back and forth, each of us trying to summarize the intervening decades of our lives in a few short paragraphs. Then the emails gradually decrease in frequency until we reach the point where we're not actually corresponding anymore, but merely observing what the other person is doing by reading their status updates and viewing the photos they post. Why does this happen? Has too much time elapsed, are the divergent paths our lives have taken too far apart to be bridged by the wonders of a social networking site? Have we really "connected," or are we just indulging out voyeuristic tendencies?

The people I stay in touch with most frequently on FB are people I saw, talked to, and emailed regularly before the advent of such sites. Now I sometimes feel that I have less personal contact with these friends than I did before we became FB friends. Where previously we might have gotten together for coffee to hear about their latest vacation and see their photos, now I just read a daily status update and view their photo album online - kind of a more distant connection. Maybe a lazy substitute for the effort that's required to actively maintain a friendship through other means of communication.

Then there's the whole issue of Facebook etiquette. What if you don't want to be FB friends with someone who sends you a friend request? Will they be offended if you ignore their request? Would you be offended if someone ignored you? I had an acquaintance from my jr/sr high school days send me a friend request. We hadn't been close friends back then and after perusing her FB profile, I was quite sure her interest in vampires and werewolves was not something we shared in common, and so I decided to ignore her request. But what if you do friend someone and then feel the need, for whatever reason, to un-friend them later -  what are the consequences of that? What about the people who send you friend requests which you accept, and then there's no communication from them at all - no status updates to read, no emails, no photos posted - just eerie silence and the feeling that they're watching you. Are they just collecting friends? It all gets very weird and complicated sometimes.

And now there's yet another place I have to check for emails - in addition to my Yahoo email and my Outlook email and my work email! Hmpf!

Well, I've once again established that it's impossible for me to post a brief blog entry, haven't I?!

  

Wikipedia gets me up on my soapbox...big time!

It's difficult to ignore Wikipedia. It's right there, all the time, the first or second entry in my hit list when I search for almost anything on the internet - musicians, authors, places, wines, philosophers. My general impression of Wikipedia at the beginning of this assignment was that it was ubiquitous but unreliable and therefore not very useful.

Of course, it's hard to talk about a thing without comparing it to something else. So here's what I did:

I searched the following terms:
Edward Abbey - American author and environmentalist
Jesse Cook - Canadian flamenco guitarist
Cochrane Alberta - where I live
Tempranillo - type of Spanish grape/wine
Arthur Schopenhauer - German philosopher
Marc Atkinson Trio - Canadian gypsy jazz musical group
West Coast Trail - famous hiking trail on the west coast of Vancouver Island

Places I searched:
Wikipedia
Google
Britannica Online
Canadian Encylopedia Online

And the winner is...Wikipedia!

And here I was, all prepared to trash talk with a hastily scribbled list of negatives. Well, I'll get to those in a minute, but first...

What I like about Wikipedia

Truly encyclopedic, it's a great first place to begin searching for almost anything, from grapes to guitarists, towns to trails. While there was an exasperating dearth of hits for most of my searches using Britannica or the Canadian Encyclopedia, and Google overwhelmed with a profusion of results that frustrated and distracted me, Wikipedia strikes a nice balance, providing an initial hit with lots of options to expand and explore. Entries are usually written in straightforward simple language, and where I happened to encounter words like anthropocentrism or rubato or aphoristic (I keep forgetting that one!), there was always a handy hyperlink to enlighten me.

The Contents box lets me see what's included in the article and allows me to jump to a particular section if I don't wish to peruse the entire thing. The See Also, References and further reading, and External Links offer access to interesting tangents, discographies and bibliographies, but also primary source documents that are important for research purposes.

The discussion and history tabs are interesting as they allow a glimpse into any behind-the-scenes controversy that may be taking place regarding various aspects of the article, and these could be used as cues to do more investigation on those points.

What I don't like so much about Wikipedia

Where'd my scribbled notes go? Oh, yea...

I nearly drowned beneath the apparently infinite ocean of information available in About Wikipedia. Unlike most Web 2.0 technologies that I've explored via concise Help, About, and FAQ pages, Wikipedia's introductory information is...what's the word...well, it made me feel hopeless of ever grasping the intricacies of how it worked. I'd read for a bit, then click on a link of particular interest such as administrators, researching with Wikipedia, or reliability of Wikipedia and end up in yet another labyrinthine article with even more links. This is not a good place to be for someone with obsessive compulsive tendencies (like me), who feels compelled to read all the introductory material before using the technology!

My other beef with Wikipedia is more a general dispute I have with the idea it seems to put forward that openly-edited content is better than non-openly-edited content. I'm not sure I buy that, always. (Warning! I'm climbing up on my soapbox here.) Call me crazy, but sometimes I like to know that the person who wrote the information I'm reading is an actual, qualified, certified, recognized expert in that field, not just a self-described expert. Go to Wikipedia:Administrators and scroll on down to the History section where you'll find this quote by Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia co-founder:

I think perhaps I'll go through semi-willy-nilly and make a bunch of people who have been around for awhile sysops. I want to dispel the aura of "authority" around the position. It's merely a technical matter that the powers given to sysops are not given out to everyone.

Hmmm. Argh! There's so much that I take issue with in those three sentences. Let me summarize by saying that it's not a statement that inspires trust and confidence in the system about which the person is speaking.

Or how about this line from Wikipedia:How to edit a page: "After your first edit, you will be a Wikipedia editor!" Really? Can I put that on my resume? Like it's some sort of important achievement. For me, it's somehow tied into our current preoccupation with: I've got to tell the entire world what I'm doing every second of the day on Facebook or Twitter, I've got to post all these videos about my riveting life on YouTube, I deserve my 15 minutes of fame on a "reality" TV show, I should get to add my two cents to any forum discussing anything I'm remotely familiar with, oh, and let's not forget...I've got lots to wax eloquent about on my blog! Obviously, I'm being slightly hypocritical and facetious here as I'm frequently on my FaceBook account, I have thrown in my two cents in forum discussions (mostly on travel issues), and well, here I am blogging...  

Assignment

In keeping with the previous rant, I don't fancy myself enough of an expert on anything to feel comfortable editing Wikipedia. I found quite a few links with no pages attached that I suppose I could have written a brief entry for, but decided to make a small spelling adjustment my first time out. Under the History section of the article on the West Coast Trail, I changed the word Pacheenaht (with an n) to Pacheedaht (with a d). Although the "n" spelling is not incorrect, the "d" spelling is certainly much more common, and is found in many places including the Parks Canada information on hiking the WCT and the BC government website.

Conclusion

My revised impression of Wikipedia is that it's ubiquitous, maybe unreliable, but a very useful jumping-off point.

Stuffed on Delicious

Back in the day when Best Websites first emigrated to Delicious, I did a tiny taste test to try to get a flavour for what exactly a social bookmarking site was, and I've used it periodically to answer the fairly bland questions we seem to get at Memorial Park. This time arriving for my second helping, I sampled the "Learn More" and "Help" features to try to acquire a more detailed understanding of all the ingredients that are blended together in order to serve up such Delicious-ness. And of course in the meantime, I've been fed a diet of terms like "tags," "tag bundles" and "clouds," so it was much more like home cookin' this time around, instead of the foreign cuisine it appeared to be at first.

You'll never starve for options on Delicious. With a buffet of 646 tags linking you to 492 bookmarks, there are many ways to find just the dish you're looking for - we don't all have to follow the exact same recipe.  I can see how it is so much easier and faster to attach multiple tags to one bookmark, than to attach a link under multiple folders or subjects.

I can't even remember now if we had a search option in Best Websites or if we did, what it was like. Searching on Delicious is easy and I like that you can see your search path at the top, related tags on the right side, and you can also click on a tag you see listed under individual bookmarks.

However, the Delicious smorgasbord might be a recipe for disaster, if the one thing you're looking for is swimming obscurely in the goulash of tags. Six hundred and forty-six is a lot of tags to look through if it becomes apparent that your topic is not contained in one of the 37 tag bundles, and I assume that number could bloat infinitely larger, at some point becoming too unwieldy to be useful. Hopefully, there's a master chef out there somewhere making sure this doesn't happen!

Also, I keep getting distracted by all the numbers floating around and what they are meant to indicate. To me, these numbers are like empty calories - tidbits of information that fill me up, but aren't necessary for actually finding what I need. I have to continually remind myself that the numbers to the right of the tag bundles are not the number of bookmarked websites found under that heading, but the number of individual tags which make up the bundle. Then, when I click on one of the tag bundles and bring up a list of tags, I have to tell myself that the number to the right of the tag is now the number of bookmarks, which is what I was expecting in the previous step. And let's not forget about the numbers to the right of the bookmarks which indicate the number of people who have saved that bookmark, and the date the bookmark was added displayed to the left of the bookmark.

Delicious would absolutely be a useful recipe box for organizations or businesses that have a lot of information they need to organize and access. But I don't think I would use it regularly enough to justify creating an account of my own. 

I think I've spit out just about all the cheesy metaphors I can cough up in relation to Delicious, so...I'll stop now. Besides, all this talk has made me hungry. It's time for a snack!