How blogging makes contacts and seeds communities

I mailed yesterday about how blogging links to other blogs and generates new contacts. Here is a direct example:

Jakob Says:


You wrote: “More, because I have added this link to my blog, Jakoblog will get notified.” This is true and it may happen that the author will come and see what you have written and even leave a comment – how often do you experience this with publications on paper? Conventional scholarly publications are so old-fashioned, slow, impractical, and inefficient. If you do your research for the progress of knowledge (and not only for your career) then you should better tag your notes at a social tagging/bookmarking service, write your thoughts in your blog, archive your summary-paper at a publication server, provide your data and sourcecode in data and software libraries, discuss you opinion in mailing lists, compile your research into other people’s work in wikis etc…. this is science in the 21st century!

… and …

From the librarian’s point of view I can tell you that archiving data is probably even more complex then it seems to be. From the computer scientist’s point of view I can tell you that Semantic Web will enlight us easily. From the Open Content movement’s point of view I can tell you that you should just license the data and make it available and usable for anyone – like you said: first make sure THAT the data CAN be used.

PMR: Thanks Jakob. There is a growing number of people like you – we need to link them to generate critical mass. In chemistry we have created the Blue Obelisk community and we have pooled our resources and efforts. This could be done for content systems – informally as well as through institutions – an example is our collaboration with Peter Sefton on authoring tools.

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One Response to How blogging makes contacts and seeds communities

  1. Jakob says:

    In the German library scene we have a growing active community around the buzzword “library 2.0” – the usage of topic-related blogs, wikis, and social cataloging applications has reached a critical mass and even the people in higher positions are aware of the changes. But it will still take some years because people don’t change that quickly. I saw that BlueObelisk started in 2002 – this is also my experience: Changes are slow but fundamental.

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