Web 2.0
Oct 22nd, 2008 by daliah.singer
Our assignment for this blog was to sign up for a variety of websites that are based on the concept of Web 2.0 - the idea that users generate content, not the site. Some examples of this are Flickr, Digg, del.icio.us and Newsvine. Flickr is a photo sharing program operated by Yahoo. del.icio.ous allows you to store online bookmarks online rather than on just a single computer. Newsvine advertises itself as “Updated continuously by citizens like you, Newsvine is an instant reflection of what the world is talking about at any given moment.”
I see how these websites can be extremely helpful for people, especially for journalists covering a beat. It is easy to search by very specific key words (or tags) and find out what people are talking about and are most interested in. But, at the same time, I found these sites to be extremely overwhelming. I also did not sign up for all of them because on some of the sites - such as Reddit and Newsvine - I felt like the limited time I’ve spent searching and reading about specific topics was not valid enough for the site. The people who post or join these communities seem to me to be very involved in keeping up-to-date on a particular topic and have enough background to be posting. (Of course, I’m sure there are some who post information that is incorrect, too).
Overall, I felt that what I would be doing would be searching for an article to place a link to without having any in-depth knowledge on the topic. So while these sites appear to be extremely helpful for finding news focused on particular topics, they didn’t seem like a proper fit for me.