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RE: Citations (WAS RE: W3C suckered by Micros oft?)

• To: 'Bob Foster' <bob@o...>
• Subject: RE: Citations (WAS RE: W3C suckered by Micros oft?)
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 08:16:56 -0600
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

Not to impose.  To suggest that it is a good idea now 
that a technology has emerged for ranking the time 
order in which ideas appear.  For the bloggers doing 
serious or quality work, it isn't that hard.  For the 
rest, let the rankings do their work.   

If this was the street corner or agora, I agree and 
even then, a good speaker cites.  But this isn't.  
This is a medium that bots harvest, and the blogs 
are made to be aggregated.  Think of it as a good 
practice.

Is it a story?  Sort of.  It is yet another technical 
development that changes the habits of the users.  The 
web is a social experiment as much as a technical 
development.  I am amazed how often we make predictions 
about it based on some development which prove to have 
exactly the opposite results from our predictions. 

len


From: Bob Foster [mailto:bob@o...]

Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
 > Someone came back offlist with the defense that
 > blogs are 'casual conversation' and therefore,
 > don't qualify for citations.

That would be me. As I replied earlier, outside academia uncited 
references are the norm. The average person can no more attribute 
sources for his or her ideas than a cow can sing "The Star-Spangled 
Banner" (Francis Scott Key, 1814).

If you want to try to impose a citation "obligation" on bloggers, good 
luck with it. But I think many bloggers view their product as a private 
communication carried out in public, witness their informal style, 
personal references, pictures of the dog. The fact that someone might 
overhear is as irrelevant on the web as it is in a restaurant.

Even the fact that some bloggers take themselves very seriously (which 
is, after all, the human condition) doesn't give much leverage to impose 
higher standards on them. A blog is like a spot in Hyde Park where the 
crowd can't talk back. It's a monologue in public, the crazy guy on the 
corner.

I do agree, though, that separating the "good" blogs from the "bad" is 
about as good a use for the semantic web as I've heard. ;-}

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