Generation YES Blog

The Library of Congress has a blog. Not only do they have a blog, but actual useful information is posted on it on a regular basis! Amazing!

The latest announcement is that they have added 3,000 images to Flickr, the photo-sharing site. In My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven, they explain:

“…the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.”

Here’s the beauty of this - not only will these images be more available, the global community of viewers can give back to the project by tagging and commenting on the images. In a sense, the Library of Congress is allowing the whole world to be guardians of our shared photographic history.

They are starting small, only 3,000 out of their collection of 14 million prints. But these are from some of the most popular collections and are completely without copyright restriction. It’s a start.

Hopefully they will add more content soon, because even though 3,000 sounds like a lot, you always need a lot of content to make people feel like they will find what they are looking for with one visit. It’s hard to run a limited “pilot test” with things like this, because if the problem is not enough content, that’s the one thing you won’t find out.

Sylvia

Google has announced knol (short for a unit of knowledge), a new service in very early testing. It will consist of free articles about any subject, each authored by one person. The tools will allow for community participation in form of ratings, comments, and other social tools.

Like Wikipedia, this is about a world-wide community collaborating to build better access to knowledge.

However, unlike Wikipedia, knol will be about unique authorship. Each author creates and owns a knol page, and can collect ad revenue if he or she wishes. The community aspect comes from how high these pages show up on searches.

Also unlike Wikipedia, knol will be completely open. There will be no editorial committee deciding that your topic is not worthy or your prose too dense. You can write a knol about science, your Aunt Betty, or your explanation of how to change a light bulb. In fact, 70 people can write a knol about how to change a light bulb. The one that “wins” is the one that people rate the best. But even if yours is last on the list, it’s still there.

Google promises that their tool will be fair and free; that you won’t be able to game the system so your knol always comes out on top.

Wikipedia has raised one set of questions for educators working to teach students about quality content and the validity of information sources, and this is going to add a whole other dimension to the discussion.

We live in interesting times, don’t we? What fun!

Sylvia