Imagine I presented you with a cardboard box, say about the size of a shoebox, containing a cookie.
If I told you the box contained a cookie, or if the box was labelled appropriately, you could grab the cookie whenever you got hungry.
Now - imagine I put that box on a shelf with 100 other boxes (containing a variety of different objects): suddenly, it becomes a lot harder to find the box with the cookie. (shoes may be nice, but they don't satisfy hunger...).
Imagine further that some unethical banana salesman labels his box "cookie", so that you may open it and choose his banana instead of the cookie you really want.
The larger your pile of boxes, the more possible diverse resources you can access (a very good thing) but also the more difficult it is to find the specific resource you are looking for (a very bad thing).
Enter the world of resource location: one of my absolute favorite topics: I hope the resources included below can give you new ways of working with your web.
I first fell in love with the web before it was the web, technically speaking. When I was in University a very cool friend of mine ( Jenn the Knitter ) took me up into the library to introduce me to the Internet.
Gopherspace was the name of the heirarchy of menues that dominated the pre web URL model, and it has shaped my love of directories ever since.
Sometimes, the fluid nature of the Internet can be a detractor - there is immense value in being able to look back in time and see how a resource looked once. The way back machine allows you to see a given site during a given period.
Google could have rested on their well earned-laurels, continuing to perfect their mastery of search. Instead, they have brought so many rich resources that you may not have used. If you haven't tried them, I recommend:
DMOZ is the mother of all directories, with tens of thousands of editors and millions of sites. By adding human editors to the process and a few descriptive lines, the Open Directory was able to significantly contribute to the process of finding good resources on popular topics. From my own experience, over time DMOZ has struggled to support its own weight. Specifically:
significantly changed or expired links not updated
difficulty in approving appropriate editors quickly
innovations in other search directory technologies narrowing the advantage gap at the core of the value proposition
Still, if the information sought is mainstream and/or not particularily prone to change or archival in nature, the summaries can provide a quick lead to a limited source of choices.
Wikipedia, and other user edited content, has fixed many of the problems of scale of the ODP by unleashing the power of editor approval. Interestingly, (and I am not sure I agree with the policy although I completely understand it), Wikipedia does not allow enterprises to submit or edit information about themselves. Still, in terms of breadth and depth a fantastic resource and a great starting place.
I was slower to adopt the microblog technology than I would normally be as it seemed at first that that was probably too much information.
I have been won over by the vector of information and the social aspects of relationship intimacy that occur.
Be warned, however, as with other social media, if you are doing it and it doesn't change you, then you probably aren't doing it right.
The best part of twitter is that the results are all public and retweeting is so immediate. Taking the pulse of the nation has never been easier (below are some good tools to aggregate and interpret the information). Because of twitter I have donated to oil spill cleanups in other countries, developed a mild interest in knitting and learned all about the education policy of the Obama administration.
Graphical representation (kind of a kite map, for the SNA enthusiasts) of the biggest and smallest twitterers following and friended to a particular topic or person.
Athough classifying Youtube as a social resource might be arguable (it is also very much a "straight" resource search system, the flow of channels and groups has combined with some phenomenal Digital Rights Management work (see below) to make Youtube a highly social resource.
Probably the single most influential social connector. A fine resource, although I wish it was a more open platform (ie. Twitter) in terms of searches.
