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to Google's website to search for something, you often have to weed through a lot of old, tangential, inappropriate, or outdated sites in order to find the things you want.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.

On Blogging

Blogs have become among my favorite ways to spend my time online. The number of blogs has exploded in recent years as more and more people become connected to the internet and advances in society and technology give people new subjects about which they can write on their blogs for everyone to see.

However, one major problem with blogs is that it's hard to determine which blogs are worth reading and which ones are better left alone. I suppose a lot of this depends on what you are looking for as a reader. Are you looking for factual content? Meaningful and insightful perspectives on current events in the news? Personal stories about someone's life? Firebrand commentary?

Because blogs are not really regulated (aside from comment moderation and posting access at times), it can be hard to filter out the good sites from the bad. So that's where technology comes in yet again. Sites like Technorati and Digg allow users to see how popular certain sites are, and allow the best or most provocative sites to "go viral" and become an internet phenomenon.

Technorati scours the internet to find out how many different sites link to one individual blog, thus leading to a calculation of "authority." Sites with higher authority are then seen as a bit more popular, and therefore more credible, than sites with lower authority. My political blog has an authority of 40. That's quite validating because when I first started blogging, nobody knew who I was, nor did anybody know if what I wrote was worth reading. But my number of RSS subscribers, unique site hits, and appearances on other people's blogrolls have steadily climbed, so that means I'm doing something right!

I have more to say about that political blog, but I'll save that for a separate post.

Thoughts on my internet usage

(This picture was taken as an undergraduate in 1995 when the internet was just taking off. Life was a lot simpler then.)

I consider myself to be a heavy internet user. Unless I'm traveling, not a day goes by when I don't get online. And in the event that my internet service is disrupted, I become quite anxious and agitated because of how integral the internet is to my daily life.

I wake up at 6:00 each morning and use the internet while I watch Morning Joe on MSNBC from about 6:30 to 7:00, when I go to work. During this time, I check to see if anyone left any comments on The 7-10 and check out that blog's statistics regarding subscribers and hits. When I get to the office at 7:30, I use the internet again to read the headlines at CNN.com and check out some message boards I'm a member of, such as Dave's ESL Cafe.

Because I'm a teacher, I'm not allowed to use the internet during class. So I wait until the breaks to check my e-mail and other political news headlines. I'll also go to Google to search for links to include in my political blog posts.

Lunch is at noon, but because I don't brownbag my lunch, I quickly drive home, make a sandwich, and then check out some other sites that are blocked at my office. These sites include those that have embedded video and social message boards relating to Japan and video games. I'll also respond to comments others left at my political blog.

At 12:45 I quickly race back to work and teach again until 3:30, when I get back online yet again to read more news. I'm home by 4:30 and that's when I have 7 or 8 windows open at once while I watch the political news on TV and update my political blog, interrupting this only for dinner, an errand, or to walk my dog.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

The people I tend to interact with online are usually the faithful readers of my blog, friends I've met in real life, and my own family members, although there seems to be an inverse relationship with people close to me and how often we interact online. I don't use chat programs like AOL or MSN Messenger very often these days, though I used to use them almost daily several years ago. I estimate that I spend at least 4 hours online each day, but it's skewed more in favor of accessing information, rather than engaging in two-way communication.