blog.ecorrado.us

I usually don’t get too excited over a media’s choice for person of the year, invention of the year, event of the year, etc., but I really do find Time’s choice for the “Person(s) of the Year” quite interesting this time around. They chose “You.” More specifically, they chose people who participate in creating content on Web 2.0 applications such as Wikipedia and YouTube.com. Being that one of my main areas of scholarly research involves the use of Web 2.0 applications and web sites to libraries (and the greater information seeking world), I find this choice right up my alley. Posting information on blogs, MySpace, etc. gets a lot of bad wraps sometimes. Many of us have heard stories about Millenials who post too much information on these types of sites being turned down for a job, but their are also some good things that happen because of these types of things. I have heard of people getting promotions at work when their bosses came across their blogs and other writings about a topic that the company needed expertise in, but wasn’t aware that they already had an employee who was knowledgeable in a particular area. In the library blogging world, we have seen librarians such as Meredith Farkas living out her 9′th grade dream, in some part due to being able to demonstration her writing skills and insight on her “Information Wants to be Free” blog (Congratulation’s Meredith!). Too be sure not all is positive that happens in the Web 2.0 world, but it is far from all negative. AS the Time article states, “Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail.” However, the likely hood of it completely failing is pretty slim at this point. Sure, we will probably be talking about Web 6.0 at some point and the online world will be different down the road, but that is what makes all of this interesting.