Jon Udell’s “Heavy Metal Umlaut”

Have you ever watched Jon Udell’s screencast “Heavy Metal Umlaut: The Movie”? It’s a screencast (a kind of low-budget internet movie) of the development, editing, and re-editing of the Wikipedia entry for “heavy metal umlaut” (you know, the mostly gratuitous little dots over letters in heavy metal band names?) Anyway, it offers not only an amusing glimpse at the use of heavy metal umlauts, but also a really useful case study of how one Wikipedia entry evolved. Tracing edits and re-edits in elapsed time is really fascinating. It answered a lot of my own questions about what happens when people change Wikipedia entries, and says a lot about how democratic this medium truly can be. Click on the word screencast from the page this is linked to.