Reboot of the Franchise

Now I have started my MSc in Library Science, I am rebooting the franchise of this web blog. Unlike other gritty reboots I'm not going to radically change the style, format or costume of the hero though I may throw in a new villain now and again.

True, said villains will have names like 'COURSEWORK', 'ASSIGNMENT' and 'DISSERTATION' but I'm sure fans will appreciate it and be enraptured by the new direction.

I'm going to use this (Amazon voucher) award winning blog as the basis for my posts about the course and also for the exercises rather than start a new one. So expect updates about Digital Information Technologies and Architectures (DITA) but also some other bits and bobs as well.

I'm actually looking forward to blogging more, but I did need a reason rather than 'because blogger.com is there'. And now I have it.

Ka'Plah!

Wiki, Wiki, Wacka, Woka

Wikipedia. Simultaneously the font of all human knowledge and ignorance. If I need to know the name of all the Transformers that’s where I go. If I need to know what fusion is, I’ll go elsewhere.

That is a bit harsh but it’s based on personal experience. Once I was reading about the Angel of Death (Josef Mengele) and it had a ‘quote’ from Hitler about how good Mengele was, how kind and caring, how he, Hitler, could not be as great with the Doctor, etc, etc. All total nonsense from revisionists but it was included as a real quote and if you didn’t know better you may think that the two were in regular communication so you’d start to have a different opinion of history than was true.

Which is where the danger lies as well as in uninformed people making statements, dodgy facts, political opinions masquerading as fact, etc.

But, to be fair, things really have moved on since then in a good way. Footnotes to actual sources are more numerous and of higher quality, editing is tighter, pages are locked and so forth. While I would not use Wikipedia as my source in my Important Works, I would perhaps use it as a jumping off point for some broad data and then go into the footnotes and references.

I don’t have much experience of other wiki based witchcraft but have been looking into some recently, so we’ll see what comes out of that.

Now that this is added to the UK Library Blogs site I expect a book deal in no time from the increased readership.

Day Two

Well it was pretty easy to set up the blog. Some features of it seem a little annoying and clunky but on the whole it has been easy and quick.

Unsure about tagging. Experience in the community space has been that tags are done to death and just end up filling up space on screen. I suppose that consistency is the key and to make sure that a spade is always called a spade. If you start calling it a shovel in one post, then a spade, then an earth mover, then a spade again, then a tool, then an implement then a shovel and then a spade again you'll never be able to find all digging related posts.

And that's enough digging for now.

Post The First

And so it came to pass that I created a blog for the upcoming 23 Things City programme. I was sure that my first statements would be full of true wisdom but as I finished this sentence it became clear that this would not be the case.

"How could this be?" I both wondered and typed at the same time.

"Because you are being too meta-narrative." was the obvious answer.

And with that, my first blog post ended.  Doubtless, better things lay ahead.