Monday, February 19, 2007

Social Bookmarks (Paper #2)

Social bookmarks can be a very convenient way to find topics of your interest as well as see what other people in the same online community find interesting. It is even helpful to be able to read some of their comments and gain insight on the articles from other perspectives. Sights such as Furl, Diigo, Delicious, and many others are making this possible by allowing you to join, posting your own bookmarks as public, as well as being able to view the bookmarks from many others. You simply type in a topic and many bookmarks come up, which you can sort through and read those which sound interesting to you or those you feel will help you in your research.

One social bookmarking program that I find quite interesting is Diigo. This site allows you to engage in social bookmarking, but also has many other features as well, such as being able to highlight and add sticky notes. You can choose to keep these private, or make them public meaning that others can also see what you highlighted and the comments that you made. This also gives you the opportunity to view the highlights and sticky notes of other bookmarks that you view. Diigo also gives you the opportunity to join groups, in which you can collaborate with others who share the same interests. For example, there have already been diverse groups created, such as those focusing on philosophy, java script, and even finance stock and project management. Diigo also gives you the opportunity to form your own groups if there has not yet been one created focusing on your interests. I have searched through many bookmarks of Diigo users and have profiled two users who I found interesting.

Social book marker, Docbadwrench, is a very consistent book marker. For example, when I searched for articles relating to culture, many results came up, a majority of them being from the same person, Docbadwrench. He has several articles with similar tags and he seems to bookmark many articles at one time, as there are at least 10 articles that it shows him bookmaking just in the last 15 or 16 minutes. He seems to dominate the articles tagged with the word, culture. This person seems to be very interested in video games as they influence culture. Examples of his saved articles include, The New Gamer, The Video Game Revolution, and Donkey Kong. He also seems to hold some interest in politics and the media, as he has saved articles about the media’s coverage of the Iraq war as well as other articles, such as The New Republic.

I also looked through the bookmarks of Kurchatovmachine. This person seems to hole a lot of interest in women, society, and eating disorders. For example, she has saved multiple articles about bulimia, anorexia, depression, menopause, and hair care tips, which are all topics that seem to be mainly targeted to women readers. I noticed that she does not use Diigo nearly as much as Docbadwrench, but she also seems to be a new user of Diigo. Her oldest bookmark was saved only about 4 weeks ago. I predict that a couple months from now because since she has discovered Diigo, she seems to be a consistent user. ave been looking through many Diigo users and have profiled two of its user.

Although social bookmarking can be very convenient, there is some searching still involved. For example, some of the articles may appear informative and interesting from the title, but then turn out to be disappointing and far from what you were expecting. I clicked on one bookmark, which was titled "Pop Culture Influence" thinking that it would be discussing the influence of celebrities and other aspects of the entertainment industry, although, it turned out to be just stories of what celebrities have done lately, such as going to Starbucks. Typing in a topic will give you endless bookmarks with similar tags, but you must be willing to sort through them, bookmarking only those that meet your expectations and interests, which will never be all of them. You must be able to be clear in your searches and use the best words and phrases possible in order to receive the bookmarks closest relating to the topic you are searching for.

Social bookmarking can be a very easy and fun way to share and find articles, however, one must know how to search for what they are looking for. Some topics will be more popular than others, and some topics will prove difficult to find bookmarks relating to them. Although, with more and more people joining in social bookmarking, searching and finding will become much easier and convenient.

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