From Document to Application, My Social Bookmarking Experience

In the past few days, I was playing around with del.icio.us, a popular social bookmarking system. I would like to share some of my experiences and thoughts here.

Before having my del.icio.us account, I used bookmark quite often. It was a feature of my Internet Explorer called favorite. When I worked full time in advertising agency, I had the folders according to different client I served, which include the industry information or competitor PR/adverting news: Intel, GM, VW, Bank etc. Sometimes, I needed to backup them in a USB flash drive so I could take it with me. When I bought a new laptop, or changed the work place and computer, I could quickly install those folders and use them. It was really helpful and time saving, because it accumulated all my previous online searching history and kept them safe and well organized. This looks like I create for myself a drawer of personal documents so I can refer to them anytime in future.

However, using del.icio.us, the social bookmarking experience, changed my view of bookmark as documents. Now I think that it plays more powerful role in my information seeking, and functions like a dynamic, self-learning application rather than static document. It is an application, because I don’t need to backup it in my USB flash driver, it can be applied in any computer, in any system or search engine. All I have to do is log in to my account in del.icio.us on a computer with internet access. Second, tags make my internet experiences more social, and enable me to refer thousands of others’ experiences which make my information seeking task easier, more efficient and accurate. I really like using tags which provide a vast amount of user-generated annotations and reflect mine as well as other millions of users’ interests. The creating and sharing of these tags makes previously dead document (web address) in my favorite folder alive and growing. They become a social community including tags (the source indication), users, and information sources. Moreover, tags, as some sort of data, speak. They tell you the trends of the topics, the amount of users, and popularity.

How about other social media tools? Aren’t they shifting our life from the document era to the application age (traditional text webpage to imbedded social media features e.g., the video gadget at the right hand side of this blog)? From solitude to community (e.g., writing personal diary to reality life show on twitter and facebook)? From being influenced by media to exert influence through media (e.g., blogs, podcast make your idea public and powerful).