Posts Tagged ‘collective body’

The Social Bookmarking Phenomenon

Some days, it seems that we are quickly evolving from a digital world where information was THE marketable commodity to a communications market, where new methods of communicating, networking and socializing are being introduced on a rapid fire basis and are the new consumers of online attention and time. Blogs, wikis, RSS newsfeeds, podcasts, video socialization built around applications like YouTube…all of these are recently formulated methods of communication that seemingly overnight have developed millions of participants.

One of the networking methodologies that has evolved from Internet architecture is the phenomenon of “social bookmarking.” One of the more popular sites is del.icio.us. On this site the notion is that you, the web surfer, share interests with others who have web access via your bookmarked URLs. It’s the same concept as bookmarking favorites with your browser, but the collection of favorites has a coding system and is shared with others. You build a library of URLs that reflect your interests and that you consider worth visiting. You add a personal “tag” with a keyword that characterizes the site.

You can “subscribe” to tags so that you see every new post with that tag. That in turn can take you to the poster’s entire list of favorites which may prove to be a new trove of information for you. del.icio.us allows you to go through the same exercise with podcasts, which are now scattered across the Internet galaxy like asteroids.

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