I have so far enjoyed this course and found the use of these new information tools straightforward and fun. My impression though is that unless a blogger is a very good writer, with strong opinions, discussing interesting subjects, then recurrent viewers would be minimal and blogging becomes simply a vanity exercise. Perhaps the most famous blogger to transcend the triviality of the net was Salam Pax who gave first hand accounts of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 from an Iraqi perspective.
A blog to me seems to fall halfway between web pages and web forums. Blogs have greater design flexibility than forums and authors have sole control over content rather than being contrained by moderators. They are on the other hand easier to set up than web pages and it is easier to include interactive features. However the possibilities for features and designs of web pages are endless if you have the technological savvy. Forums seem more democratic in design and invite dialogue rather than simple reacting to a blog post.
My only other comment about web 2 is I hope it comes to our library soon. The core information tool for a library is its online catalogue, which contains vast amounts of intellectual capital and, in most library services, attracts at least three quarters of their web based hits. Software for library catalogues do not seem to have developed greatly over the last ten years, and to the end user function like little more than hyperlinked card catalogues. In contrast look at the features that appear directly on the Amazon database – lists of similar items purchased by users, user defined tags, ratings of books, customer reviews, links to related forums, and user constructed lists for all patrons to see. Why is it that the most effective reader-centred information provider is an online bookshop?
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