On Social Bookmarking

I like to think of social bookmarking as a way to make using websearches easier. When you go to Google's website to search for something, you often have to weed through a lot of old, tangential, inappropriate, or outdated sites in order to find the things you want. Social bookmarking is good because it allows you to visit sites that have been recommended by other real people who are interested in the same things. I think this could potentially allow websearchers to save time.

However, I'm not quite on board with the importance of sites like Digg or StumbleUpon or Citeulike because if you have reasonably strong computer skills, you are probably going to be able to find what you are looking for without the assistance of social bookmarking. We learned in this class the various ways of making your search strings more powerful, such as capitalizing certain words, adding quotes, and adding "OR" or "AND" strings.

Another disadvantage to social bookmarking is that even though they should theoretically make websearches more efficient, it's still maintained by people, and people are not always perfect. In other words, some sites might be improperly tagged, thus causing people to miss what they are looking for or to have to weed through something they're not looking for. In addition to this, who's to say that the popular site that you can find on Digg is a site that you in particular are interested in. With your own bookmarks in Internet Explorer or Firefox, you are the sole arbiter of which sites you want to provide quick access to via bookmarks and which sites don't quite make the cut.

Social bookmarking didn't really exist when I was an undergraduate, so I'm admittedly not quite on board when it comes to using this, either in my regular internet use or in the classroom. But maybe my opinion will change.