Social bookmarking

Personalizing the Internet: Blogs was the title of a recent presentation I gave to the Oak Park Computer Club--it was one of the reasons I started this blog in the first place. I will link to the finished article when it's ready. Technorati is a very useful blog-oriented real-time search tool.

One of the trends that's personalizing the Internet in a big way is social networking. There are several aspects to this worthy of mention, including networking sites such as Orkut (a Google affiliate), MySpace, and Friendster; there are also photo-sharing sites such as Flickr (now owned by Yahoo!). RSS figures in there too.

The main thrust of this post, however, is the recent rise of social bookmarking (article). One of the abiding problems of the Internet as we know it is the aspect known as the deep Web--that is, the hidden parts of the Internet unseen by search engines such as Google or Yahoo! Search. While some of these problems are addressed by the Teoma search engine and moderated sites like About.com, social bookmarks take a more-direct and broader-based approch to the problem, allowing users to post hyperlinks where they can be shared, if desired; once something is found, it can be added to the "memory pool" and searched as needed. One of the first and best-known of these sites is del.icio.us, but there are others--including Furl and del.irio.us--that offer similar services.

In the future, whenever possible, I will post appropriate groups of links to del.icio.us and link there. Many of my favorite links are already available on the Web--see the OPCC Links listed on the right sidebar. I will also start cross-posting these to del.icio.us shortly.

Since I mentioned Flickr in passing, here's a good example of its usefulness.