[Web4lib] Social Networking Sites | Social Bookmarking Sites

[Emily Molanphy]

To continue along Robin's line of thought, I would break off a subgenre of
sites that revolve around entities in addition to people. LibraryThing would
be such a site because it is used to catalog (in the looser sense) books;
del.icio.us is such a site because it is used to keep track of links. The
additional entity serves as a focus for the site, usually searchable ("who
likes 'To Kill a Mockingbird'?"), which you tend not to see emphasized in
the same way on sites like MySpace, or LinkedIn, which are social networks
in a more straightforward sense.

I wrote a blog post <http://emily.molanphy.com/library/?p=12> a while back
about what I called "inventory sites." Some have to do with physical objects
(bottles of wine), others with electronic items (journal citations), and not
all of them have a social aspect. Those that do seem to allow users to
connect at the point of common interest rather than directly to each other,
as Robin says. So I would see the distinction Gerry is making between social
networking and social bookmarking sites as the point at which the social
networking and inventory genres intersect.

On 8/29/07, Robin <rboulton at stcharleslibrary.org> wrote:
>
> The most visible difference I perceive is that one allows direct,
> unstructured communication/interaction between members (e.g. MySpace),
> while the other allows you to publish your information and make it
> accessible to others, but doesn't support direct interaction ( e.g.
> LibraryThing).
>
>