It is easy to get overwhelmed by the massive amount of information that is available on the Internet. On virtually any topic, there are a multitude of websites, articles, blogs and wikis out there just waiting to be found and pored over. However, the task of sifting through cyberspace to find the information that is truly relevant and useful to you can be frustrating and time-consuming. Hours can be wasted on unnecessary tangents and dead-ends. This is where "social bookmarking" sites such as Delicious and Digg come into play.
Social bookmarking refers to the act of "bookmarking" links to websites and articles and then sharing that list with the online community. These links can also be "tagged" with descriptive terms that allow the article to be searched for at a later time. This whole process is sometimes referred to as "folksonomy," a taxonomic classification system created from the "ground up" by the end users. As more people link to and tag a certain article or website, the higher up in the ranking it goes and the more likely it is someone else will see it. This works as a natural "peer review" by weeding out the less popular content and ensuring that the articles the most people actually want to read will remain the most visible.
There is another side to this coin though. By putting the power in the hands of the general masses, we are trusting much to the "wisdom of the crowds." Mass popularity, however, is not always an indication of high quality or of interesting content. The most popular movies, music, and books are usually not the ones that are the most critically acclaimed and prone to further analysis and study. The process of peer reviewing and determining what content to publish has traditionally been done by a small, select group of professionals, as opposed to the general public. This brings us to the question as to whether social bookmarking is really a "democratic taxonomy that allows the community to peer review the content of the Web," or if it's just "a disorganized collection of personal preferences." My take on it is that it can be both, depending on the context.
Chances are that a person taken at random will have different interests than myself, so their list of favorite websites and articles might not interest me very much. However, because the online community is such a vast and broad group of people, patterns begin to emerge on a large scale. By playing with such large numbers, we can ensure that there will be at least some validity to the shared content. Sub-sets of smaller communities branch out from the overall online community, and the key is to find these communities of like-minded people. By utilizing the "tagging" system and searching for relevant keywords, you can cut right to the topics that interest you and bypass all the extraneous content.
A logical extension of this is the potential use of social bookmarking in the clearly-defined worlds of academia and the professional workplace. By nature, these groups have common interests and benefit from the collective sharing of information. Social bookmarking allows them to organize and break down the information on the Internet into relevant "micro-content" that pertains to their particular area of study or work. This can be a very effective way to organize the massive amount of content on the Internet to make it more easily searchable and manageable.
Social bookmarking refers to the act of "bookmarking" links to websites and articles and then sharing that list with the online community. These links can also be "tagged" with descriptive terms that allow the article to be searched for at a later time. This whole process is sometimes referred to as "folksonomy," a taxonomic classification system created from the "ground up" by the end users. As more people link to and tag a certain article or website, the higher up in the ranking it goes and the more likely it is someone else will see it. This works as a natural "peer review" by weeding out the less popular content and ensuring that the articles the most people actually want to read will remain the most visible.
There is another side to this coin though. By putting the power in the hands of the general masses, we are trusting much to the "wisdom of the crowds." Mass popularity, however, is not always an indication of high quality or of interesting content. The most popular movies, music, and books are usually not the ones that are the most critically acclaimed and prone to further analysis and study. The process of peer reviewing and determining what content to publish has traditionally been done by a small, select group of professionals, as opposed to the general public. This brings us to the question as to whether social bookmarking is really a "democratic taxonomy that allows the community to peer review the content of the Web," or if it's just "a disorganized collection of personal preferences." My take on it is that it can be both, depending on the context.
Chances are that a person taken at random will have different interests than myself, so their list of favorite websites and articles might not interest me very much. However, because the online community is such a vast and broad group of people, patterns begin to emerge on a large scale. By playing with such large numbers, we can ensure that there will be at least some validity to the shared content. Sub-sets of smaller communities branch out from the overall online community, and the key is to find these communities of like-minded people. By utilizing the "tagging" system and searching for relevant keywords, you can cut right to the topics that interest you and bypass all the extraneous content.
A logical extension of this is the potential use of social bookmarking in the clearly-defined worlds of academia and the professional workplace. By nature, these groups have common interests and benefit from the collective sharing of information. Social bookmarking allows them to organize and break down the information on the Internet into relevant "micro-content" that pertains to their particular area of study or work. This can be a very effective way to organize the massive amount of content on the Internet to make it more easily searchable and manageable.
As an example of this, I have tagged 6 articles in my account at Delicious that are relevant to my fellow students in the graduate program for Technical Communication at NJIT. The articles cover recent topics of study, including web design, typography, usability and digital copyright. Because we use a unique code that only the other students and professor will know, we are able to create our own separate community within the broader Web. This allows us to zero in only on the information that pertains to our studies and is a great way to enhance the collective learning experience.
The ability to manipulate and organize the information on the Internet to make it more personalized and relevant is a necessity, given the size and scope of the Web. Social bookmarking fulfills this need, and as such, is an important tool of the Web 2.0 era. While there are concerns as to giving too much sway to the whims of popular sentiment, this still remains the most effective way of organizing the vastness of information that is the World Wide Web. As it is, the process of peer reviewing would be too massive an undertaking to be done by a select group of professionals. This provides further proof of the Internet as the ultimate "democratic" communication tool, for better or worse.
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