On The Muppet Show Tonight

September 28th, 2006

I must admit, I didn’t “get” wikis when I started playing with them 4 years ago. There was a lot of “huh?” and “this is dumb” comments coming from my mouth. But, like many other tools, wikis grew on me, but it wasn’t until I saw their value in some far off, but practical, examples did I understand the true nature of the “Wisdom of Crowds” principle that inhabits wiki thoery.

Take, for example The Muppet Wiki. I need to look at it further, but in theory, it should beat the pants off of any traditional muppet encyclopedia in terms of content because it is created by the masses (should we call them muppetheads?) Also, it should be more up to date, for obvious reasons. But is it more accurate? In theory, yes. If the Wisdom of the Crowds holds up, and I believe it does. I’ve seen many examples of wikis in the past and will see many more in the future, but it will be wikis like this that reinforce the notion that wikis work.

So, are narrow focused wikis the future in wikiville? I don’t know. Part of me thinks that Wikipedia is way too big, but part of me feels that the reason it is so popular is what makes it work (even though it has been proven that only a handful of wikipedia readers actually contribute to only a small portion of the articles). But there seems to me that more narrowed focus wikis separate from the “Big Wiki” will work better, bring in core users, and thus thrive. The Simpsons is the longest running cartoon on television not because it does well on the ratings (it doesn’t) but because of hardcore fans.

Narrow focused blogs also survive because of hardcore fans and readers, not because of popularity amongst a national audience. In the library world, “old school” blogs like librarian.net and LISNews have been around for a long time because of a following.

But then there’s the Googles and the MySpaces and the FaceBooks, which are extremely popular and aren’t going anywhere. But, just as popular are the niche social network sites (Dogster, etc) that focus on something specific. These, I believe, will be the ones that have more of an impact on those that are part of niche groups. If, for example, there was a MySpace specifically for the library community, I would be more likely to use that one than MySpace (I set up an account many moons ago and was quickly bored) or FaceBook (I don’t have an account).

So, to paraphrase Kermit:

Why are there so many social network services? I think it’s a niche thing. One in which Wikis and other Social Software tools are moving towards, which I love.

Oh, and you create a MySpace for librarians and libraries, I’ll join and “friend you”.

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