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Not to impose. To suggest that it is a good idea now
that a technology has emerged for ranking the time
order in which ideas appear. For the bloggers doing
serious or quality work, it isn't that hard. For the
rest, let the rankings do their work.
If this was the street corner or agora, I agree and
even then, a good speaker cites. But this isn't.
This is a medium that bots harvest, and the blogs
are made to be aggregated. Think of it as a good
practice.
Is it a story? Sort of. It is yet another technical
development that changes the habits of the users. The
web is a social experiment as much as a technical
development. I am amazed how often we make predictions
about it based on some development which prove to have
exactly the opposite results from our predictions.
len
From: Bob Foster [mailto:bob@objfac.com]
Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> Someone came back offlist with the defense that
> blogs are 'casual conversation' and therefore,
> don't qualify for citations.
That would be me. As I replied earlier, outside academia uncited
references are the norm. The average person can no more attribute
sources for his or her ideas than a cow can sing "The Star-Spangled
Banner" (Francis Scott Key, 1814).
If you want to try to impose a citation "obligation" on bloggers, good
luck with it. But I think many bloggers view their product as a private
communication carried out in public, witness their informal style,
personal references, pictures of the dog. The fact that someone might
overhear is as irrelevant on the web as it is in a restaurant.
Even the fact that some bloggers take themselves very seriously (which
is, after all, the human condition) doesn't give much leverage to impose
higher standards on them. A blog is like a spot in Hyde Park where the
crowd can't talk back. It's a monologue in public, the crazy guy on the
corner.
I do agree, though, that separating the "good" blogs from the "bad" is
about as good a use for the semantic web as I've heard. ;-}
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