The effect of web 2.0 on information management

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. 

This six minute video (that I have just spent the last 18 minutes watching, re-watching and persuading colleagues to watch with me) says more about the mind spinning effects of web 2.0 on information management than a thousand text books/ blog posts/ wikipedia entries.

It was made by Michael Wesch of Kansas State University.

It is witty, clever and informative, I found it inspiring.  For the whole of that 6 minutes (repeated 3 times) I felt glad to be in this field of work

The thesis of the film: organising information is no longer the sphere of experts, it is the sphere (and the responsibility of everyone). One of the assertions the film makes is that 'we can now make information find us'. This information found me because my browser home page is set to 'http://del.icio.us/tag/folksonomy.  That page simply shows me the last twenty webpages that anyone in the world has tagged with the word 'folksonomy' and saved to their favourites on del.icio.us and tagged with the word folksonomy. And at 3:35pm today, London time, this video had just been tagged and saved by Thierry De Baillon. Thanks Thierry!

Comments

[Simon Carswell]

James, this one has been linked to by several blogs I subscribe to with RSS. And with good reason. It's one of the few information management related presentations that I think could be interesting to 'non information' people. I'd put the Common Craft Show presentations ( http://commoncraft.com/) in the same category, but this one is richer and more inspiring.

Simon

[John Akeroyd]

James

About from being entertaining it makes some very astute points about how the information business keeps on changing and that in turn raises real questions about we information professionals should know/be doing or be trained to do. I have no answer other than encouraging others to think more radically about the systems and services they provide and remember none will last.....