Open Source

Open source isn't new to me. I've known about wikis and Yahoo!Answers for a while now, but it's still a very interesting topic to read about. There are so many things we can do with open source information. At the library, we could use wikis to share information with each other. Not just from department to department, but from branch to branch as well. A great idea would be to turn Orange Seed into a wiki so that anyone could post an idea and see what kind of reaction it would get. That would definitely show which ideas people would be open to compared to the ones are now shown on Orange Seed.

Instead of posting a question on each of the answer websites, I typed in a topic, "Philip K. Dick" to see what sort of questions and answers there are about this author. Yahoo!Answers had the best topics. The one question I choose to explore was "Why was Philip K. Dick heralded as a great science fiction writer?" Answerbag had this question "What do you guys think of Philip K. Dick?" and askville didn't seem to have to many serious questions concerning the author beyond "What is your favorite Philip K. Dick story?" Yahoo!Answers seems to be a bit more intellectual with the questions, as well as the answers that are given compared to Answerbag. In fact, the question I stated coming from Answerbag was the only one having to do with the author, the other questions that came up were a bit inappropriate. I did not find this on Yahoo!Answers, there were pages and pages of questions that were relevant to Dick. If Answerbag wants to become more popular that Yahoo!, they've got some work to do. Primarily with weeding out the inappropriate material.

I have googled my name before and have never found anything remotely close having to do with me. I googled again, and sure enough, absolutely nothing. And man, does that make me happy.