Buzz… Buzz… Buzz…
Today’s buzz word is Social Bookmarking! Mr Jones, what will you wager?
Whether you’re up on the social bookmarking (a.k.a. social browsing) phenomenon, or you just hear a lot of talk about it, the fact is, the way the public at large has been led to modify their search practices, and methods for information retrieval in general have undergone a metamorphosis– and if you blinked, you might have missed it, but chances are, you’re probably already comfortable with the change– whether you know it or not. Actually, that idea of a “change in the web”– some have called “Web 2.0”, the very phrase is passe and cliche by now. More truthfully, the never stopped changing such that there was a “Web 1.0” to warrant the classification of a “Web 2.0”, and will continue to change beyond anyone’s ability to control it; to maintain any social trends purposeful for the gratuituos lining of someone’s pocketbook. Only 2 or 3 short years ago, the emerging web technology such as FlashMX Professional, ASP.NET and the dot-net framework, the growing popularity of MySQL and Open-source technology– those headline items that were all-the-rage are likely either forgotten about by now, or those once exciting technologies, and the magical emergence of the open-source underdogs are now pushed out of the limelight and merely maintain their existence to support or supplement something else which has pushed its way into the foreground. And so it will probably continue. It’s difficult to believe that any web technology might enjoy the tenure to witness itself growing stagnate because there are just too many creative, brilliant minds working together, either collaboratively toward the completion of some project, or indirectly and independently by way of such channels as social bookmarking and feed aggregation. ah, but i digress– i REALLY digress this time!
My Bookmarks are Hungry for Reading!
Then FEED them!
I wrote the paragraph above to get you in the mindset of the advancement of technology, so you might want to try new things just for the sake of it. Allow me to share with you something that i discovered recently which i think is a handy, and fun little discovery.
if you currently have an account with the two services which i know will work with this method, then i urge you to try it just for fun. My favorite is the relatively new service by Yahoo! named MyWeb 2.0. This service allows you to use your existing Y! account, or create a new one if you’re not already an account holder at Yahoo!, to store your social bookmarks on their server. That’s basically it. Yahoo!’s MyWeb 2.0 can be your social bookmarking repository. I particularly enjoy some of the MyWeb features over those of the more popular del.icio.us
Is the social bookmarking phenomenon the “end-all, be-all” miracle of modern technology? Of course not! Those of us who do our best to stay abreast of the trends in web tech have been aware of the technology which powers social browsing for quite some time. The questions then are “What is next?”, “Who will be the target audience of the next wave of new technology?”, “How will that new technology manifest in popular culture? Will we see it in the newest cell-phones? In a GPS device? In a credit card?”. Who is going to open the door for a new way of thinking, and a new way of taking advantage of the ever increasing ability to gather, exchange, and use information and data? Will it be you? How will you change our perception of the use for a new form of communication, or information?