John Battelle Interviews Michael Wesch

Posted on February 19, 2007

John Battelle has an intersting interview with Michael Wesch, PhD, a Cultural Anthropology professor at Kansas State University. Michael Wesch is becoming well-known because he is the creator of this very concise Web 2.0 instructional video< that has been heavily blogged about.

In the interview Wesch talks about some of the Web 2.0 tools he uses. He told Battelle that he is a big Netvibes user. He says, "One can think of the Web as a place where multiple overlapping global conversations are taking place simultaneously. To keep up with these conversations I have established my online home at Netvibes, which allows me to integrate almost all of the tools I use and organize them into different "tabs" in a way that fits with my online life. I have a tab for blogs and comments which allows me to track multiple online conversations, along with a blog search module that updates whenever somebody posts something related to the topics I am currently interested in."

Wesch said he uses feeds from social bookmarking tools like Diigo and Del.icio.us. He also likes Cite-U-Like, a social bookmarking service for academic journals. Wesch also mentioned a few video editing and tagging tools that many people may not yet be aware of.

Wesch says, "Sites like Flickr that allow photo tagging make it easy to monitor the photos, and with new video services like Viddler, Mojiti, and Bubbleply that allow users to tag, comment, and create their own content within and on top of existing videos, it will soon be possible to be alerted the moment somebody uses a tag to describe any particular piece of an online video."

You can keep up with more from Michael Wesch and his Digital Ethnography class and work group on the Digital Ethnography blog.