If you're a user of the fantastic del.icio.us linklogging system
and, like me, you often annotate with a memorable quote from the page
you're bookmarking to facilitate later retrieval, you may find this
useful.
Drag this del.icio.us
bookmarklet to your links bar, then edit it by replacing USERNAME with
your username. Clicking it will send the text you've highlighted to
your linklog along with the URI and title of the page you're visiting. (Tested in Firefox and Internet Exploder 6. Mad props to Bowen Dwelle.)
Update: and this simple variant will display your tags and recent bookmarks on the submission page.
"I suspect that over the next few years we will see a lot of calls
suggesting that blogging has died, and I suspect that in a sense they
will be right. The act of keeping a "Weblog" as a separate entity will
become something of an anachronism. The broader world of collaborative
Web publishing will continue to grow and converge with other
technologies, including IM and e-mail. Imagine asking someone today if
they are an "e-mailer." That question made sense, among a certain
group, 15 years ago, when you weren't sure if someone had e-mail or
not. I have a feeling that the production of public media -- whether in
the form of Weblogs, wikis, collaboratively filtered lifelogs, or some
form that I am too shortsighted to predict -- will be the moving force
of a new era."
For a year or so the Invisible Adjunct weblog
has provided a forum for academics to (mostly) discuss issues relating
to campus politics and working conditions in academia. Last March the anonymous author
decided to leave the profession and sign off from her weblog.
The only problem is that over time a real community has gathered around
that weblog, and those people clearly want to continue talking - as the
200-odd comments on the sign-off post attest.
I figured some of them would rather switch boats than go down with the sinking ship, so I created an Invisible Adjunct channel on the Internet Topic Exchange
to aggregate relevant posts from members of the community. Much to my
pleasure the channel has been put to good use by interested parties:
about a hundred posts have appeared on the channel so far.
Of course many participants wish to preserve the memory, but it is
unclear who's calling the shots at this point. Who wrote the site?
Granted, the IA wrote all the front page material by herself, hundreds
of posts. But there are also thousands of comments in there that have
been contributed by readers. A commenter raises the issue in those terms:
"I believe the comments form the bulk
of the site overall (correct me if
I'm wrong), and that much of the value comes from the conversations
that took place under IA's supervision. In some sense she's not the
"author" of the site, but rather the caretaker of an online community.
"
I have no idea what's going to happen to that content, but I guess the
moral here is "use caution before you invest significantly
in a site that you don't control". A lot of commenters might now find
themselves wishing
they had commented on their own site so that their words wouldn't go
down
with the rest. What do you think? [] links to this post 9:16:31 AM
