The Interaction between Humans and Social Software: A Personal View

I decided that I had better look back at my original blog posts before posting this week because I don’t want to repeat myself and I wondered if my opinions had changed over the past few months. I made a comment near the beginning of the course about not liking the fact that once online the blog post is there “permanently”—I cannot change my mind and delete it; I cannot correct errors in it. I still think this is annoying, and bloggers should be able to edit their own blogs. I find reading blogs on the Internet that have no substance just a waste of time—and so I avoid them as much as possible. For this reason, I am reluctant to put on a blog anything that is not founded in research or serious thought. So for me, blogging is a good method of collecting my thoughts on a subject—but I know I need to add more personal opinion—that is what makes the post interesting to read. I still hope to use the blog to determine my own interests and points of view. I can see how communities of bloggers read at each others’ blogs and share ideas—that’s ideas, Jill, not facts.

Del.icio.us has been an interesting browsing tool within our course community. I did not, however, find it useful for general browsing outside the community—the quantity of unrelated material one has to browse through to find the “serendipitous” link takes too much time to go through. I do think I’ll continue using del.icio.us for personal tagging and later retrieval. I will also use Cite-U-Like.

RSS Feeds are a great idea, but I don’t find them very useful hiding on my aggregator where I have to go and search for them and where they are out of context on the aggregator screen. I did not use the aggregator to access fellow-student’s blogs—I relied on the course blog’s listing, where I could link directly to the blogs and see the updates in context. I like feeds onto my desktop. I also still prefer information fed to my email (listservs, etc.).

Wikis are great for collaboration for internal projects. I certainly intend to use these. I also intend to become reasonably proficient in Second Life in order to witness the virtual world that parallels the real world. This course has been a trip to various options in cyberspace—where we continue to socialize as human beings, which we do best in small groups. We will continue to “tread” virtually in new paths, but still interact as humans.

A Pile of Tags

So much information is being produced. More than human beings have ever experienced before. Cataloguing sytems such as the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress Classifications Libraries are not actually that old—born in the late 1800s. They were able to handle information in libraries before the advent of the Web. But now, librarians could not possibly hope to categorize the huge amounts of information.

Enter bookmarking (Hammond et al.). In the absence of an imposed structure on the Web, individuals organized according to their individual needs, first of all saving links as bookmarks or favourites onto their computers. Now social bookmarking adds a sharing element to this individual activity. Tags are not being chosen by professional cataloguers—they are being chosen be people from all walks of life. The result is, in David Weinburger’s words (quoted by Rainie), “The Power of Digital Disorder”. Tag language, or folksonomy as it has been coined, has many limitations because of inconsistencies in use, and lack of control. However, “self-interested use leads to a collective abundance” (Udell). and it seems tags are here to stay.

More focused uses for them are being developed, such as through CitULike. I think that the many suggestions proposed for guidance in tagging--such as having hierarchies (a step backwards?!) suggested, having tags used by others suggested, having Boolean searches of tags made possible (Hollenback)—must not lead to too many restrictions because creators and users will be less committed to tagging.