Social Bookmarking!

Social Bookmarking is a very good innovation. Innovations like this, Google products and even YouTube, people are becoming more and more connected and are able to help each other. Social Bookmarking takes the idea of bookmarking pages you like on your browser but streamlines it through tagging then allows you to share with others. I know my bookmarks bar is practicully rendered useless at this point because it has so much stuff on it. I totally lose sight of sights because I bookmark others, pushing previous bookmarks back out of sight. With Social Bookmarking, tags allow to easily recall sights that you're looking for.

With so many resources, blogs and inspirational sights used be graphic designers like myself in the field, its easily to lose bookmarks or get very unorganized easily. Social Bookmarking can definitely solve this problem. The other thing is the fact that you can share our bookmarks can really help your peers. I could see it being really helpful if one team of designers creates one social bookmarking identity and everyone simply adds to that one account. That could be a great project and can be very helpful for a collaborative group.

This link I found (interestingly enough only opened in a GoogleDoc) from the Educause Learning Initiative. They discuss several topics pertaining to Social Bookmarking and is a good read. One thing I thought was interesting was that they pointed at Social Bookmarking's amateur aspect. There's no mediation so people can easily leave out necessary tags and such. Maybe sights such as Delicious can scan tags and create tags on its on and then allow the bookmarker to add their own personal tags.

WEB 2.0

Web 2.0 is today. It is the ability for Internet users to not only access information but share and find it in a variety of ways through avenues such as Blogger, Flickr, or Twitter. Sharing and creating is the basic idea between these applications. This creates networks and communications between people, software and WEb sites and creates communities among them. Applications can be found today that can do practically anything on the Web. The question was posed....are we the machine or is it using us? In many instances, the argument can be made for both sides. Yes, you update your accounts and statuses and customize almost everything so you become it but consider how Internet experiences are now being tailored to you. Ads and Web content, even shopping suggestions are being formulated by what you look at at. The machine is essentially watching and using you to help its creator. Personally, I don't mind. As long as privacy stays true, I'm all for advancement and personalization.

In the advertising field, Web 2.0 tools are extremely important. Social Networking has easily become an advertising avenue: there isn't one company or brand that doesn't have a Facebook fan page and/or a Twitter account. Consumers want access to brands...they want tot feel like they are a real person in sense. With brand loyalty and sentiment association that can change in minutes due to information being disseminated, brands need to reach and share as much with consumers as possible in order to hold no only their attention, but their dollars. Web 2.0 will not slow down at any point in the near future but with Augmented Reality on the forefront, Lord knows how far technology will take us in the near future.

This video is a comprehensive, in-depth and more academic look into Web 2.0 presented by explainingcomputers.com . In the video, the presenter hits almost every base of Web 2.0 usability in a general sense with a focus on the bigger names such as Google and Social Networks. It explains some of the back end understanding of things.