Week 8 : Discovering Web 2.0 tools

This week is looking at the Web 2.0 awards. There's so many categories and so much to choose from.

I decided to look at the Wiki category because I think this is the most obvious application we could use to draw in greater borrower interaction with the library.

PBWiki comes across as being straight forward without the assumption of huge masses of knowledge about the Internet (good for those of our borrowers who don't have this knowledge and feel intimidated by it). The tour was very good and displayed the features in a easy to read style (but without explanation of some jargon such as RSS). I see that Yarra Plenty's summer reading camp Wiki has been created with PBWiki so it must be good and its advanced features was used in the week 17 exercise. It also has a word wizard with features such as conversion of PDF docs to Word but most of these features you have to subscribe to(which means, of course, that you have to pay - what happened to the notion that Wikis would mean equality for all to contribute to the Internet?)

It was awarded quite high on usability but average on interface and design. It has a forum for questions and answers on tagging and while quite helpful on the technical aspect of this it offers nothing on the matter of controlled versus uncontrolled vocabularies let alone other issues such as synonym control, hierarchy, etc. While this is not really the place to debate the pros and cons of the two different vocabularies I think these issues should be made clear for Wiki creators/users at the point of creation so that we can attempt to addres the tagging 'problem'.