Media of the future

I'm in a conference on Scholarship and Libraries in Transition, which is focused around the mass digitization projects going on here and elsewhere and how that's going to transform...well, everything. Tim O'Reilly is a very interesting guy, and his talk seemed to focus on shaking his finger at businesses for not coming up with a way to make money off of these mass digitization projects. I understand that money makes the world go 'round, thought I'm an anti-capitalist in that I don't believe in making massive profits off of somebody else's desperate need. I'm not sure how I feel about what he said, but it was interesting. Then there was a professor from Princeton who poo-pooed a Wikipedia article about "World history" which neglected to mention key scholars and works that are basis of modern scholarship. Though he did acknowledge that Britannica didn't even have an entry on this topic, the first question that sprang to my mind was, shit, you saw this error, why didn't you go in and fix it? Any dude with a computer can do it.

The most interesting speaker so far is a professor from the University of Montreal who talked about digital documents are closing the distance between people and texts, how they allow people to be more engaged with texts. About how printing critical editions forces a snapshot of a body of knowledge at the time of printing, and how with web content these snapshots are not possible. (Are snapshots necessary?) How does one cite ever-changing sources of information? And how can we use citations from things like theses (in the lit reviews) to create a web of knowledge/map out the body of knowledge on a topic? Fascinating, oui oui.

Must ruminate more later.