Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Mangalore
Puducherry
Tiruchirapalli
Thiruvananthapuram
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
Just tag along
|
Social bookmarking opens the door for collective wisdom of community, G.B.S.N.P. Varmareports
|
Photo: C.V. Subrahmanyam
Go tech-savvy Technology has spared us the pain of book-marking manually
Twenty six-year-old Lalit is doing Ph.D in environmental science and he is working on a thesis on carbon emissions. An information junkie that Lalit is, he wants to find and read ‘the cream of the web,’ on the topic. He has already book m
arked websites he found interesting for future use on his computer. “Well, with the number of websites search engines throw up, I was almost getting lost in the maze,” he says, adding: “I don’t know how others working along similar lines are doing or finding different leads.” Even “sharing bookmarks on the computer with my friends,” is tedious.
With a surfeit of news channels bombarding news and stories and Internet search engines throwing up innumerable sites that, sometimes, make you lose good stuff in the heap, how does one get “the cream of the web?”
Fortunately, help is at hand. Social book marking “the best optimal way of securing news and keeping abreast of latest happenings in the field,” says Lalit. What makes it more interesting is ‘the human element going into this sharing.’ Now he is able to enter into conversations with peers. Unlike the old media that restricted itself to sharing information, social book marking is a simple process of saving bookmarks to a social book marking site like Digg.com, Del.icio.us or stumbleupon.com and tagging them with appropriate keywords. Since these sites provide info about who saved these bookmarks, people can strike a direct conversation with the persons sharing same interests.
Search engines index the information, whereas social bookmarking depends on the resources from personal space of users. “It’s completely community-driven,” says Murali J., a software professional. “The beauty of it is that you get access to the most interesting bookmarks in your area of interest,” he says excitedly.
As a Digg member, you submit links to the article or a news story that you find interesting. If other Digg members find an interesting article, they Digg it then, as the ‘Diggs’ accumulate for a particular story, the story finds rising to the top of Digg queue, ultimately ending on the Digg’s front page. “There is no way you can beat this information overload,” Chandrasekhar, a frequent Digg user, attests. “Other than going to social bookmarking site” he now has ‘the sophisticated point of view,’ about world affairs.
Here you upload your lists of social bookmarks that you find worthy of future reference and share them with others. You can check out what other users are bookmarking and have a ball. “It’s social bookmarking at its best,” says Janardhan K., a sociology student, who keenly follows the trends of online communities. “These technologies give the ever-broadening view of things.” If, for example, “society responds to a particular problem in a certain way, you get to know a different way of solving it,” he adds.
You get to know the top sites that the users find interesting or ‘hot’. This site allows you to organize bookmarks using ‘tags’ and search through tags, so that you can find the most interesting and relevant stuff quickly.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Mangalore
Puducherry
Tiruchirapalli
Thiruvananthapuram
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
|
