#4 Wikis part 2

Had a further look at Book Lovers Wiki. One review did catch my eye, a fairly accurate summation of Dan Brown's execrable dross The DV Code :

I finally got around to reading The Da Vinci Code and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite characters that are beyond flat and a writing style that is almost comically bad. What carries the book is its fascinating premise;

. The 'fascinating ' premise appears to have been totally lifted from Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, regardless what the British courts say.

Anyway, this wiki seems more like a blog. Opinions on books don't build a single entry, but are each separate entries, bit like a forum for posts on different topics.

Speaking of blogs, it seems to me they generally tend to be a particularly clumsy way of having a conversation with anyone willing to listen - typing is a fair bit less efficient than talking - and given that conversations are ephemeral, disappearing into the ether as soon as spoken, and given that humans have committed ideas to paper generally when they have been discussed, thought out, edited, rewritten and generally polished until fit to be published, it seems to me that generally, but not always, blogs diminish the fairly low quality of most 'information' on the internet. They usually tend to be conversations, therefore ephemeral, therefore only worthy of recording after much thought etc, not worth recording merely because those thoughts have existed and have been expressed.

Booklovers wiki seems to fit the above in that the entries are conversational, a bit like asking someone what they are reading on the train, they might say something like

The Cinderella Rules by Donna Kauffman
Cinderella Rules takes a modern day woman and makes her over with the help of three “fairy godmothers.” The relationship dispute of the two men for Darby didn’t seem that tense, but the end had a lovely twist where everyone turned out for the better

. That's a brief conversation on the train or in the lift, hardly worthy of recording and making available to the entire world, yet bookloverswiki does.

Most entries on bookloverswiki are brief, lacking in depth, another hallmark of most (not all) 'information'/data on the internet. This is another by-product of the online'conversation'. Like real conversations they are often off the cuff, not really thought out, worthwhile as ephemeral conversations but not worth recording....yet they are recorded

The subtext of blogs, and some wikis, probably tell us a bit about bloggers and wikiers, and by extension about the society they/ we live in, but the content often doesn't tell us much about the subject....just like casual conversations, except we are recording the conversations and putting them into a global repository of information.