What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.
Ask Metafilter Annotated Bibliography
Pomerantz, J. & Stutzman, F. (2006). Collaborative reference work in the blogosphere.
Reference Services Review, 34(2), 200-212.
"There are a few online communities whose primary function is to provide a forum for users to post questions and contribute answers; Ask MetaFilter (ask.metafilter.com) is one such community. While Ask MetaFilter is not a reference service, and is not affiliated with a library, it does to a certain extent fulfill some of the same functions of human-mediated question-answering, and so provides examples of conversation-like reference transactions.
The following question was posted recently to Ask MetaFilter: '
Me and the SO want to go on a week-long civil/voting rights tour of Alabama in January.' The questioner goes on to request suggestions for food, lodging, and attractions. Within 24 hours, this original post had received 15 comments in response. Some of these comments are very brief, just a sentence or two, while some are several paragraphs long with highly detailed suggestions and instructions. Some of these comments make specific recommendations, while some are offers to put the questioner in touch with locals and tour guides. In short, while not all of the comments may be useful to the questioner, there is a wide enough range of comments that some are likely to be. Further, the questioner's Ask MetaFilter profile contains a link to her blog, so it is possible that after her trip to Alabama, she may write a post about it, thus providing her respondents with feedback on the usefulness of their suggestions.
The purpose of Ask MetaFilter is not to provide reference service, but rather to provide an online environment “that anyone can contribute a link or a comment to” (www.metafilter.com/about.mefi). Further, the question discussed above is perhaps not a typical reference question. This example is compelling, however, because it demonstrates that reference-like interactions occur naturally within the blogosphere, even outside of reference services. Further, it is not unusual for reference librarians to receive questions asking for recommendations on any number of topics: books, local activities, restaurants, etc. A single reference librarian, in response to this question, might have provided the questioner with a travel guide to Alabama, or a book or magazine guide to local restaurants, or might have spoken from his or her own experience. Because this question was posted to a community blog, however, many individuals were able to contribute their own experience to the conversation, thus greatly increasing the value of the reference transaction, and ultimately providing a far richer response to the question than would have been possible with a single answerer.
The downside of this example is this: Ask MetaFilter is only one of perhaps millions of blogs on the internet. The cognitive load of requiring question-answerers to visit multiple blogs to follow question threads, is not optimal."
McDermott, I. E. (2006). Gadgets and Geezers: The Tao of Technology.
Searcher, 14(9), 18.
Ask Metafilter is one of 15 websites profiled by the author. “Oregonian Matt Haughey hosts this community-generated site for sharing questions and answers. Members address practical topics covering a broad swath of daily life. Type words in the search box to 'query the hive mind’.”
West, J. (2006). MetaFilter: Going Your Way.
Library Journal, 131(17), 88.
Or we can just keep asking questions like this until Matt goes insane and runs naked through the streets and gets locked up. Either way works for me.
Metafilter: It didn't seem broke, and this doesn't seem to fix anything.
best username ever: nebulawindphone.
