7 hours ago
Showing posts with label web 2.0. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web 2.0. Show all posts
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Social Beings
BEFORE
This time last year I had just returned from a nine month journey, mostly overland from the UK to Australia. Throughout the trip I regularly used Flickr, Tripadvisor and Couchsurfing sites as my social networking and/or bookmarking tools.
Flickr enabled me to look up the areas we were going to, photos were labelled for other travellers, and friends and families were kept up to date as to where we were (2littlehobbos). Tripadvisor helped us avoid stinky hostels and couchsurfing enabled us to stay with local students throughout Iran.
But the trip is over and I have not looked at any of these sites since. The photos are still up so some people may be looking at them, but I am no longer interacting with the site. All the accounts are linked to my Hotmail account, which with new work and RMIT accounts I now rarely check. It’s amazing really the short-term value of so many subject specific social networking sites on the internet.
NOW
Since returning home though I have discovered that broad social book marking sites are much more useful for the long-term. Delicious will continue to grow with my interests and now that I am home and using the internet regularly the site has helped me to categorise sites as per their use. Delicious has also helped me find an array of interesting blogs via their tags so it feels like the internet world is much easier to navigate. Fellow group member nuggen also writes of the benefits of Digg which manages to tag particular passages- it’s incredible really.
However, the marketing potential of social bookmarking is probably the real reason for the success of sites like Digg and Delicious.
According to Internet Marketing Melbourne utilising social bookmarking sites is the cheapest marketing tool around (accessed 2010).
Ben Zimmer from the New York Times (March 2010) has also written an interesting article on the meaning of being social today, how the word as a verb has changed the internet and social bookmarking’s ability to popularise a web site. View here.
And so I have realised that the little blogs I thought I had stumbled upon were actually being raised above all others by authors utilising a range of social bookmarking tools available to them. How much information am I missing out on simply because their authors are not into social bookmarking? Would anyone be reading half the number of blogs they do without them? And maybe I should go back over my Delicious tags and rename them more effectively. Surely management would be a more useful tag than mgmt?
Oh, and not to be left behind I also have to figure out how to add the Delicious link to this blog. Web 2.0 maintenance never ends!
This time last year I had just returned from a nine month journey, mostly overland from the UK to Australia. Throughout the trip I regularly used Flickr, Tripadvisor and Couchsurfing sites as my social networking and/or bookmarking tools.
Flickr enabled me to look up the areas we were going to, photos were labelled for other travellers, and friends and families were kept up to date as to where we were (2littlehobbos). Tripadvisor helped us avoid stinky hostels and couchsurfing enabled us to stay with local students throughout Iran.
But the trip is over and I have not looked at any of these sites since. The photos are still up so some people may be looking at them, but I am no longer interacting with the site. All the accounts are linked to my Hotmail account, which with new work and RMIT accounts I now rarely check. It’s amazing really the short-term value of so many subject specific social networking sites on the internet.
NOW
Since returning home though I have discovered that broad social book marking sites are much more useful for the long-term. Delicious will continue to grow with my interests and now that I am home and using the internet regularly the site has helped me to categorise sites as per their use. Delicious has also helped me find an array of interesting blogs via their tags so it feels like the internet world is much easier to navigate. Fellow group member nuggen also writes of the benefits of Digg which manages to tag particular passages- it’s incredible really.
However, the marketing potential of social bookmarking is probably the real reason for the success of sites like Digg and Delicious.
According to Internet Marketing Melbourne utilising social bookmarking sites is the cheapest marketing tool around (accessed 2010).
Ben Zimmer from the New York Times (March 2010) has also written an interesting article on the meaning of being social today, how the word as a verb has changed the internet and social bookmarking’s ability to popularise a web site. View here.
And so I have realised that the little blogs I thought I had stumbled upon were actually being raised above all others by authors utilising a range of social bookmarking tools available to them. How much information am I missing out on simply because their authors are not into social bookmarking? Would anyone be reading half the number of blogs they do without them? And maybe I should go back over my Delicious tags and rename them more effectively. Surely management would be a more useful tag than mgmt?
Oh, and not to be left behind I also have to figure out how to add the Delicious link to this blog. Web 2.0 maintenance never ends!
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