Mediacology

An interesting interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales:
Wikipedia Founder on the Web’s Evolution - Newsweek Technology - MSNBC.com:

What’s the next big thing on the Web?

There’s this very overused phrase of Web 2.0, and now people are getting so sick of it that they’re starting to talk of Web 3.0, but I don’t think they really know what it means. What I think about Web 2.0 is that it’s about these kinds of communities and social norms and practices and software that implements. So things like [the photo-sharing Web site] Flickr—the first time I saw Flickr I thought, this is going to be overrun by spam and garbage in no time. And then it wasn’t. And craigslist, which has a community that polices the advertising. That trend is really where we’re headed.

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What about user-generated content? Is that going to put journalists out of business?

It’s definitely the way of the future. But I do have limits on my Utopianness. I haven’t yet seen citizen journalism come close to what exists [in news publications].

You place so much faith in the “community.” How do you define the community?

It’s a very overused term on the Internet, but to me it means people who actually know each other, whether in real life or online. That really helps to [encourage] good behavior.

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