web

An interesting experience from the classroom:

Most of us beyond our early '20s use a term, social networking, to identify activities that have become second nature to Web 2. In a class I determined that I would introduce some scholarly social networks in order to expand their comprehension of social networking.

Luckily, I began by asking "what is social networking?" The class was large and students are often shy about speaking in front of many people. I repeated the question. No raised hands were evident. I changed the question. "How many of you do not know what social networking is?." Now I saw many raised hands.

I pursued the top a bit asking if they knew about or used Facebook, MySpace, or other sites that joined hundreds or thousands of people in communication. Most students participated in social sites.

Suddenly I realized what was happening. My students had been using social networking as a normal and  frequent activity. They were social networking as a matter of course and never needed to be told what we older folk needed a term to comprehend the activity.

Microsoft have released Internet Explorer 7 and the reviews are mix, to say the least.

ZDNet is reporting that:

IE 7 is limited to Windows XP SP2 users only; installation requires reboot; reuses old IE 6 code and doesn't yet comply with current Web standards; doesn't match all the features found in Firefox or Opera; carries a Microsoft legacy of not patching its IE flaws quickly enough.

Trusted Reviews is saying:

Ultimately with Firefox 2.0 going into an unexpected third Release Candidate last week the availability of IE7 could be seen as a big fillip to Microsoft but this long overdue browser is already so far behind the offerings from Mozilla and Opera that it will take several years to make up the distance. Incidentally, if you don’t download IE7 now it will be installed as an automatic update sometime over the next month. Resistance is futile my children, but use is optional.

CNet says:

In the last two-three years a huge amount has been written about tagging and folksonomies, much of it with the bright-eyed enthusiasm of those who haven't seen the present state of affairs in a broader light; but where is the fight-back from the formal classificationists, who hither-to ruled unchallenged in this area? Have such giants as the Library of Congress and the Dewey Decimal System fallen at the first hurdle?

Tagging is the assigning of arbitrary tags to content by amateurs (typically content creators, editors or readers) and folksonomies are systems built from the ground up using these tags. Tags have no formal meanings and there are no constraints placed upon them. Folksonomies are central to systems such as flickr, del.icio.us and the whole web 2.0 approach.

Formal classifications, such as the the Library of Congress and the Dewey Decimal System are rigorous systems in which trained individuals assign subject categories to content. Each category has a description and is long lived—categories don't change even when the words used to describe the topic in popular culture change. Thus the LoC still calls cars automobiles, because that's what they were called when they first entered the system.