Example of Social Media - Collaborative Bookmarking

For example, when you find a website you like, you bookmark it so you can find it later. You can even organize bookmarks into folders based on subject. Suppose you could get access to everyone else's bookmarks? If you had all this information you could derive things, like which pages are bookmarked by the most people. You could also determine the various folder names people use to organize their bookmarks. By examining all the other sites in these bookmark folders you could build up a list of categorically related sites. With enough data you would have a brand new way of looking at the web, not from a mathematical search perspective, like Google's, but from a human perspective.

Let's go back to the Soda Pop Stop. In the same way that the owner was able to use his knowledge to recommend a soda suited to my tastes, so too the aggregation of people's use of the web leads to content we might like. If I'm at Soda Pop Stop, John's help and recommendations are invaluable. They make the overwhelming number of choices more manageable. If I go to his website rather than his store, I don't have him as a resource to guide me. But if I could somehow get access to his internet bookmarks (assuming he used them) I might be able to get some clues about which sodas are his favorites. If I could get all the bookmarks of all the people who ever bookmarked the pages in his site I would have even more to go on.

Of course our bookmarks are listed on our personal computers and associated with our individual browsers so this information is not publicly available to the whole world. They belong to us and are part of our private information. It's nobody's business what sites you and I bookmark. Is it?

But what if everyone was willing to share their bookmarks, and even add their thoughts, opinions, and evaluations of the sites they bookmark? Imagine how robust a resource could be created. For example, suppose a few of us were into the history of the Civil War. Maybe each of us has a folder in our browser's bookmarks called "Civil War." I might have a few sites bookmarked that you might find very interesting and you may have a few I might like to go to. I might not ever find these sites using Google, but if I could see your bookmarks, I could check them out. And maybe there is one site that all of us have added to our Civil War bookmarks folders. If someone else who was just getting into studying the Civil War could see all of our folders and noticed that we all had this one site in common, they would probably guess that this might be a good place to start reading.

Here's the rub: in order for people to share a maximum amount of information with each other they would need to be very open with their web viewing activity, their bookmarks, and their reviews. But generally the idea of being open on the web is considered a very bad idea. For example, as a web development company Newfangled has had to find technical ways of keeping people's email addresses off of websites. This is usually done to keep spammers from scraping them from the site and dumping them into spam databases. Most people are afraid of having too much of their identity online.

This theoretical willingness to being open with information is not actually theoretical. Believe it or not, there is a growing population of web users who are extremely open to sharing their bookmarks, preferences, opinions, and just about anything else. There is a huge contrast in web culture between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Young people, in the Web 2.0 generation, are radically transparent with their online identities, their personal blog entries, the music they're listening to, the blogs they read, the friends they have. And all this human collaboration, human collections of knowledge, human recommendations, and human popularity is the fuel that makes social media work.   next >