playing well in the blogosphere
Friday, December 19th, 2008i have been reading peter morville & louis rosenfeld’s excellent information architecture for the world wide web recently. chapter 5 deals with ‘organisation systems’ and touches briefly on organising data with user-driven folksonomic systems. whilst recognising the power of folksonomy, the authors were quick to emphasise its limitations by, amongst other things, gently deriding content on blogs written by folksonomy enthusiasts by claiming it simply ‘plays well in the blogosphere’; the barely-hidden implication being that said content, which broadly speaking is enthusiastically received online, wouldn’t stand up to the much more critical scrutiny it would doubtless receive in the <quotes>serious</quotes> world of professional publishing.
i learnt a great deal from the book but this section left a nasty taste in my mouth, especially as having made this dainty put-down the authors then went on to point out weaknesses in the folksonomic model. this is definitely something that they should do, but if they are genuinely interested in a balanced - and therefore stronger - argument they should meet out the same treatment to the field of paper publishing as well.