Wading into the Social Computing pool

Inspired by work, I have waded into the Social Computing* pool. I work in the SOA space (service-oriented-architecture for those that care) and Web2.0 is becoming a big topic - bringing all the new technologies together that fuel Social Computing tools in a way that's easy to manage and even easier to integrate. I actually have two curiosities in the area, one from a technology perspective (more of a job necessity than a curiosity), and the other from a marketing perspective. These Social Computing sites have flipped marketing on its head and I'm fascinated.

So I watched a webinar that listed the top 10 popular social computing sites, and I hadn't visited most of them. For shame. This became my to-do list, and I started with www.delicious.com (aka www.del.icio.us). It's a fancy-schmancy URL bookmarking tool. Its value was a little lost on me at first, but I warmed up. Rather than treating URLs like documents and storing them in a hierarchy of Favorites folders, it's a searchable list - and you create the search criteria. So if you "tag" all your joke sites with "joke", all you do is type in "joke" and they all come up. But maybe you want to see magic trick sites? So you tag those "magic". The magic though is when you want to see sites that are both. One entry, multiple tags, means you can do lots of cross-section searches. Create a "cloud" and you make a collection of sites. I have a cloud called "social computing" :-). Added bonus, you can connect with others that have bookmarked the same sites. It provides a context for reaching out to folks with similar interests.

So I'm having fun! http://del.icio.us/heather_taylor50.

If you want to play with delicious, take the time to look at their tutorials; it helps you get a big picture of what you can do with it. The coolest tip for me was the notion of tagging things with stars (*) so you could sort by 5-stars, 4-stars, etc.




* What's "Social Computing"? It's Facebook. It's Blogger. It's Flickr. It's LinkedIn. It's Wikipedia. It's web sites that bring people together creating a powerful community run "by the people, for the people", not the hosts. A new one I was recently introduced to is www.caringbridge.org. A friend and coworker of mine has been diagnosed with cancer and he uses this site to share his experience with loved ones, and for loved ones to share their sentiments back - it's a great service! Sites like Google, eBay, even Evite (which I love!!) were just the beginning...