Contextopedia
Description
David de Ugarte:
“The great blogosphere toolbox keeps a treasure trove of equal worth to that of blogs: contextopedias, encyclopaedic dictionaries linked to blogs or companies. But before we move on to the birth of contextopedias, let us ask ourselves: what does a company mean for its environment? Within the framework of the coming capitalism, the company is increasingly becoming a context, a set of concepts and pieces of knowledge, of established experience. Exactly what is made explicit in a contextopedia.
If the blogs written by company collaborators are the
cavalry that spreads the company discourse and kickstarts
its conversation, the corporate contextopedia (collectively
created by all those who work in it) would be its identity,
the conceptual common framework within which they
develop their mission, discourse, and conversation.
This hybrid model of personal blogs and collective
contextopedia has an additional advantage: if bloggers
move to a different company, it’s quite possible that they
will still link to the definitions which they contributed to
create, or maybe they will even quote them in their new
work place.”
(http://deugarte.com/gomi/the-power-of-networks.pdf)
Discussion
David de Ugarte:
“A contextopedia is therefore a personal or corporate blog space which specialises in defining and expounding frequently used terms, conclusions which are seen as solid, and closed debates.
If contextopedias include things that are not under
debate, it’s precisely because it’s contextual definitions
that define identity. Two people may disagree about
absolutely everything: but as long as they share the same
context definitions, they will share a common identity and
will understand that their debate is taking place within the
framework of a similar view of the world, not within an
antagonistic framework.
The network made up of all contextopedias, in all their
different formats, would therefore be an expression of
identity, a map of identities, and a form of distributed
encyclopaedia, all at the same time. That germinal
network would amount to the soul of the blogosphere.
The logic that would have many contextopedias rather
than a single one (usually Wikipedia) is often criticised on
the basis that it’s more difficult and costly for users to find
something when there is more than one place in which to
look for it.
It’s true that this cost has decreased since the creation
of tools like Google Coop. Nowadays it’s easy to build for
oneself a mini-Google that will only search in specific
sites (for example, in a certain rank of related
contextopedias or blogs).
It is true, however, that even if they are small, it's
obvious that diversity entails certain costs. But the fact is
that socially they are worth it.”
(http://deugarte.com/gomi/the-power-of-networks.pdf)