The Challenge Rambles and riff raff about all this and that

Handpicked or mass picked?

The explosion of all things social in the web has some undesired side effects. The one I find more frustrating and harder to cope with is information overload. There are a gazillion bloggers, social-network posters, public forums, public Q&A and wikis out there to ever be able to read the smallest portion of useful information.

True enough, there are plenty of copycats, post republishers and other sorts of undesirable content leeches out there (just for fun I once searched a full phrase on a news "en vogue" just for the fun of it, only to find the exact same content on 7 different and well known sites). Then there are the one post-wonders, people who setup a blogger or WordPress account just to post once or twice. Finally there's all that content I'm personally not so interested in.

With all this trimmed content there is still a huge amount of information I’d like to read or at least review. Of course this is not possible. There’s more content in written form out there than I could ever read in my whole life.

Here is where the question (and this post title) comes into play. How to discriminate the best out there from the just good or the plain crap?

Here’s where social bookmarks come into play and have a key role. Social bookmarking tools and sites only exist due to the enormous quantity and diversity of content out there. Back in the dark ages previous to the dot com bubble, such sites couldn’t possibly exist, not only because there were less people “surfing the net”, but because the amount of different, quickly updating content was limited to only a handful of sites.

In my mind I discriminate social bookmarking usage in two major categories, mass picked or handpicked; both have pros and cons. The mass picked bookmark sites can act both ways, it’s up to the user if they go to the homepage or whatever “what’s got” link and start from there or if they trust their friends or known notables links instead.

The mass picked approach relies on the statement “the more the merrier”. Links can make it to the homepage based on the sheer number of people who bookmark it. There are a couple problems with this. First of all “popular” doesn’t necessarily mean “good”; moreover it seems to be in direct opposition of the long tail marvels the web have us so spoiled with. Another big issue is spam. As with most good things these days, spam can really spoil the fun for everyone really quickly. A battle exists amongst spammers and social bookmarks programmers who make huge efforts to make each other life’s miserable. I really hope the programmers make spammer’s life a living hell.

Handpicked-only bookmark sites are not so social and can only act as such. You rely on other people surfing and annotating on what they find. Under such light, I’d rather stick to Chris Pirillo’s Lockergnome. I mean at least Chris has been doing it for over 10 years.

Bottom line is I am a DIY sort of person. But there’s a “but”. It is right there in the first paragraph of this post. There is just too much stuff out there. My approach is to trust my friend network on del.icio.us and follow any link I find interesting on the 40+ blogs and site I visit regularly.

Yet, I still feel I don’t get the best out of everything. But I’m afraid that is a feeling that will never go away, it is just how the world goes. Then again my experience tells me that the best is yet to come, and as social bookmarking grows in knowledge and experience we shall see some very interesting improvements over the next few years.

Do you rely on popularity, just “search” or trust others calls on web content?