No.4 Blogger - Sharing thoughts

Blog sites provide a personal space for people to write. My own blog has been a sort of note book for web surfers rather than a personal diary. As you know, I have been using my blogs, My First Blog and the Broadband Revolution in order to help me plan talks and this talk is also being recorded in my blog. Sometimes I change my earlier posts in order to keep them up to date. I was very pleased to find that you can find my blog by typing “thebroadbandrevolution” (all one word) into Google and then my blog will open up when you click on I’m feeling lucky. Blogger is linked to other Google sites and so I can sign in to them all in the same way. A blog is a social web site because anyone in the world can access a blog and add comments.
Reading the Lady, the other day, (I’ll read that again) I was especially impressed by Blaugustine, the blog of Augustine, the alter ego of the writer Natalie d’Arbeloff, which she now publishes on her own web site. She gets many comments from readers. She says that she did not begin her cyber journey until 2001 and now includes satirical comic strips, paintings, photos, video and an ongoing illustrated autobiography in her blog which has won a national competition. Perhaps it is the most notable feature of a good computer application that it brings together in one parcel all sorts of different things that you didn’t realise were related. Sometimes this is called “convergence”.

No.3 Wikipedia

Wikipedia, my No. 3 site, is the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. I described in an earlier post how I had signed into the site in order to edit some of the posted articles, including one on Chichester Cross. Wikipedia is a social site where people can share information. There was some concern about the reliability of this information but is almost as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. I seach it many times each day, adding"wiki" to my Google search request. Sections on living people are improving rapidly and are a most useful source for questions about the media. Today I wanted to know more about Itshak Perlmann, the virtuoso violinist, who contracted polio when he was four. I often have a Wikipedia page open as I listen to the radio or the television.

Chichester Cross

What an extraordinary phenomenon is Wikipedia! It is an encyclopedia, created by web users, which can be altered by anyone who signs in to the site! One might imagine that it would contain a lot of inaccurate information but it is suggested that in some respects the information is more accurate than that in a published encyclopedia, being more up to date. Wikipedia is the biggest "multilingual free-content encyclopedia" with over two million articles.
I have been trying to find out about some buildings in Chichester, Chichester Cathedral and Chichester Cross. Not surprisingly there is a very good web site for Chichester Cathedral including its history, its present and information for visitors. One way find a relevant web site is to click on "I'm Feeling Lucky" using the Google Search Engine. For Chichester Cathedral, I'm Feeling Lucky gives you the Official Website, for Chichester you get The Chichester Web but for Chichester Cross, you get the Chichester Cross entry in Wikipedia.
I have signed into Wikipedia and made some changes to the entry for Chichester Cross. I wonder whether they will be altered further by the moderator and other authors. I have added something about an earlier wooden cross, the Caen stone and the reason for building the Cross, using information from recent books by Roy Morgan and Philip MacDougall.
The use of many hotlinks is one of the best features of Wikipedia but one of the hotlinks in the Chichester Cross site was to a potentially pornographic site. I have deleted it.
A more difficult problem was the misspelling of Bishop Storey. There is a separate entry in Wikipedia for Edward Story(sic) and so that spelling will have to be changed as well.
I can understand the fascination of writing for Wikipedia. I have found some most helpful entries, providing information that I could not find elsewhere.I can't imagine writing for Wikipedia without the speed of Broadband though. Where will it all end?