Sunday, February 22, 2004

Blogs and open source
Vegard A. Johansen is a young Norwegian man studying media theory in Copenhagen. He also has a blog, an article (in Norwegian) on the history of weblogs in relation to the history of the internet and the open source movement, and a bottle of wine.

It is fascinating to see this kind of work surface: the student article where the blog meta discussions I have been part of and still occasionally participate in is quoted and put into a larger context. Vegard Johansen attempts to link to the open source movement, and pulls in familiar names: Vannevar Bush and Tim Berners-Lee most prominently among those. It triggers the knee-jerk of a teacher seeing a student have lost out on articles, references and work that should be quoted. This is an article that ought to be re-written with a wider set of quotes and published as the topic screams for attention, but the effort is exactly what it presents itself as - a work by a student who is not yet a fully-fledged scholar.

Nothing wrong with being on your way to something though. And if you read Norwegian, go have a look. It is not such a bad read.

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