A short item such as this one won’t allow me to do justice to the richness of the material. So instead, I’ll just point you to the Web 2.0 forum on the Encyclopedia Britannica blog (yes, even encyclopedias have blogs these days). In it (blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/category/web-20-forum/), a number of prominent writers debate and discuss where the Internet might be leading us in terms of scholarship, copyright, expertise and individual versus collective authority.
The discussion is kicked off by Michael Gorman, a prominent librarian and Web 2.0 critic, and he calls one of his essays, provocatively, “Jabberwiki.”
And between the various responses solicited by Britannica and comments posted by readers, the collection offers proof that the Web is more than just a place to troll for the latest Paris Hilton news. Gorman, by using the interactive Web as his forum, is mounting an argument against some of the very things that concern him about the Net.
