Some writing just feels this way!!
This will likely be the shortest blog entry I've written thus far for a chapter of 30 pages. When I ask myself why that might be, it seems pretty obvious. I find Axel Bruns' book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond interesting, but thus far repetitive and somewhat boring.
The third chapter, entitled "Open Source Software Development: Probabilistic Eyeballs," discusses the merits of open source software development, and it often does so in terms of how it fits the four key principles of produsage that Bruns lays out in the previous chapter (which, in case you have forgotten, are 1) open participation, communal evaluation; 2) fluid heterarchy, ad hoc meritocracy; 3) unfinished artefacts, continuing process; and 4) common property, individual rewards).
Given those 4 principles, I can easily see how open source software meets those expectations, so I did not really need to read 30 pages of difficult to read long paragraphs of only one or two sentences to convince me of this. To be fair, it is not that I am not on some level enjoying the text (I'd quit reading it if I weren't), but Bruns' style of writing makes it difficult to not just throw up my hands and say "I get it already, and for God's sake, use a period from time to time!!!"
Perhaps the next chapter on news blogs will be better. I still expect that he'll take a simple concept and use page after page to beat it into submission, but at least I'll have a thorough understanding of it once he does?!
The third chapter, entitled "Open Source Software Development: Probabilistic Eyeballs," discusses the merits of open source software development, and it often does so in terms of how it fits the four key principles of produsage that Bruns lays out in the previous chapter (which, in case you have forgotten, are 1) open participation, communal evaluation; 2) fluid heterarchy, ad hoc meritocracy; 3) unfinished artefacts, continuing process; and 4) common property, individual rewards).
Given those 4 principles, I can easily see how open source software meets those expectations, so I did not really need to read 30 pages of difficult to read long paragraphs of only one or two sentences to convince me of this. To be fair, it is not that I am not on some level enjoying the text (I'd quit reading it if I weren't), but Bruns' style of writing makes it difficult to not just throw up my hands and say "I get it already, and for God's sake, use a period from time to time!!!"
Perhaps the next chapter on news blogs will be better. I still expect that he'll take a simple concept and use page after page to beat it into submission, but at least I'll have a thorough understanding of it once he does?!
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