You mentioned usability and information overload. While we, as information professionals, are feeling the stress of information overload, I wonder how we can put ourselves in the shoes of our users and help them make sense, as well as make use of the various information tools.

As regards folksonomy, I expected your discussion to be around choosing between controlled vocabulary and folksonomy. Having read all the posts so far, the discussion seems to focus on the inconsistency of folksonomy, esp. in the context of library catalogues. You said … we would not want everyone to have a say in how we index the library catalogue … Do you think letting users tag catalogue items, in other words, adding more metadata, would enrich library catalogues and information retrieval? Do you think folksonomy allows libraries to know more about our users and the domain of their interests from a different angel? As Chris has pointed out … help libraries keep up with the thesaurus. Do you think libraries can make use of those user contributed tags to improve our services and tailor them better for our users’ needs?

Your comments also relate to information literacy, a question for all of you in week 6.

If you’re the only person who has written the blog/wiki/whatever, then you own the copyright, unless you’re doing it on your employers time, or for them, or on what have you. That’s basically the same everywhere, so no change at that point.

If it’s a collaborative effort, then you could say that each person owns the copyright to their particular section or words. However, these are often going to go thru various iterations, so it’s certainly not clear at that point.

I guess if you’re the owner of a wiki/weblog/whatever and you encourage social editing, then you are still the ‘owner’ or publisher, so own the copyright on the whole, unless you state otherwise.