the opposite of access
Looking around for print resources on wikis, I ran across this on Amazon. If you click through, you’ll see that it is a $1,000, 9 page PDF on collaboration, wikis, and blogs. Other offerings from the same source are similarly priced - including one two page document for $7,500. The publisher, IDC, bills themselves as “the premier global market intelligence and advisory firm in the information technology and telecommunication industries.” I noticed their research page was searchable, so I searched for “wiki.” No hits.
I think all of that speaks for itself, hmmm?
Comments
What do you think it means? I don't think it means Wiki is valuable but simply that some people think it's ripe for manipulation and extortion.
Posted by: michelle | April 29, 2005 10:24 PM
I think that it means obnoxious firms set themselves up as “experts” and then try to sell information that should be readily available to actual scholars. For a company that claims to do “premier research”,; this is crummy business practice on several levels. First, it renders you a very poor citizen amongst the research community, which won’t take you seriously anyway when you pull this kind of shit. Second, making your work as accessible to as many people as possible makes your work as known as possible, which is what counts as currency in research. Charging a zillion dollars for it does not make it worth any.thing.at.all.
Posted by: Krista | April 29, 2005 10:40 PM
After I'd done research in an archive in England, I was delighted to learn that IDC had created microfiche of much of the material I'm interested in. When I got my hands on some of that microfiche, however, there were notices that read "original of poor quality" to explain why some of the 'fiche were near unreadable. But I've seen those originals (held them in my hands), and they were not "of poor quality."
Bah.
Posted by: gzombie | April 30, 2005 12:28 PM