Blogosfera &Microblogging

In this invited lecture, Joaquín Salvachúa talks in first time about blogs. Blogs are all isomorphic; all of them have the same structure and used a very simple network to run. He also said that blog reader comments establish links between blogs and this links suppose the pre-social network social graph.

Blogsphere

Blogs allows multiple conversations (1 to many) (comments and tracebacks) while web doesn’t. Blogsphere is a blog network that allows multiple conversations ongoing. Spider is not resistant to problems and goes in one direction while Starfish goes to all directions and if one part of his structure goes down, another grows up.

Microblogging

A blog is an online diary that can contains multiple links to many other sites. Microblogging is the same, but in this type of blogs, you can only put less than about 140 characters. Another difference of the typical blogs is that there are asymmetric: you don’t have to follow somebody if he is following you.

 If you want to search  a post, there are the falsonomies (tags that people do) and ontologies (tags that system does) that allow you to see the topics that you are interested.

Wikis

A wiki is a website that can be edited by multiple users. The characteristics of the wiki are an easily notation format, the possibility of modify, create or delete information and conserve the change history. There are a lot of wiki managers available with a wide variety of packages available.

Ward Cunninghan said about wikis that it invites to the users to edit a page or create new pages with a common web navigator and it promotes associations between different pages but it doesn’t look so much neat. To solve this, the contents are refined through small contributions.

There are 4 different types of users in wikis. The adders are the users that add information to the wiki, the synthetizers summarize, organize and consolidate the information. The minimalists are the users that only make minimal changes to the text like orthography or leave comments and multiplexers are responsible of common tasks.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free multilingual encyclopedia based in wiki technology. It is written by multiple people, volunteers, and anybody could modify the information that it contents. It is the eight most visited web place and the biggest wiki in the world. Wikipedia is a newfangled place because is free, collaborative, open to anybody and articles are in constant evolution and fast correction.

Wikipedia has as values that it is an encyclopedia, search the neutral point of view, doesn’t has firm standards and his content is free. This latest value means that anybody can use, apply, copy, distribute or modify in another works but I can wrote what I want. In a doubt case, Wikipedia has the value of use common sense. His content is a world heritage.

Wikipedia had an exponential grew in latest years, coinciding with the internet improvement, and it works because there are more people making than destroying. Anybody can do useful contributions and user’s knowledge complement the information. All this structure is coordinated by Wikipedia Foundation.

If you are a reader, Wikipedia is a useful tool but you should read with critical insight. You can’t believe everything that you read because something could be wrong.  If you are a user, the experience can be rewarding but sometimes stressful because of vandalism or wars of points of view could happen.