Ppl use Wikipedia to access encyclopedic knowledge on a certain topic.
Ppl use Google for a broader search on a topic.
Ppl use Del.icio.us to receive selected search results that have been pre-selected by human users.
Ppl use Amazon for buying books online.
Ppl use eBay to find a used spare part or other interesting items available for purchase.
The other day I saved this link to my delicious account which provides many interesting DIY manuals on various topics. You know how many websites there are that provide DIY manuals or user guides? Many! – BUT! you’ll never find them because they aren’t as SEXY as Wikipedia or Google or Delicious or Amazon. “Sexy”, as in “known + popular + easy to use”.
WHAT WE NEED to have is a 1stop-resource-online with manuals on each and every topic, all of them attributed with a CreativeCommons licence for transparency reasons and a tagged system.
THE BEST WAY to achieve this would be to ask ALL providers of DIY manuals online to enter their publications one by one into a social bookmarking system online (or a dedicated website on this topic) and tag them with appropriate keywords for further reference.
It would make things so much easier.
Besides, having them in a social bookmarking website, we wouldn’t need to create one huge server with bandwidth capacity, but instead everything could remain where it is right now… also, i am just talking about DO IT YOURSELF manuals here, not the usual corporate *soft* blabla like “discussion papers”, “***** framework”, “what ought to be done”-papers and other “please consider the environment before printing this paper”-documents that are just justifying the PhD of some authors but don’t change anything to the better for those who are willing to change the situation they are in and could actually make use of the aggregated knowledge as found in DIY manuals.
Me thinks: most organizations just don’t do this because a) they don’t know about social bookmarking websites, b) there’s no policy on this, c) they are consequently not paid for this extra work and d)? there’s a certain aim to stick to their publications = products = proof of their work = income generator for the years to come.
