http://www.digitalsolid.com/2007/03/18/youre-it-tagging-social-bookmarking-and-marketing/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
Intriguing blog post with an excellent link to a YouTube video. Blogs, YouTube, and Wikipedia are all contributing to sharing, collaborating and linking us. The growth of social networking is linking people all around the world with similar interests, backgrounds, hobbies, occupations, ages, etc… The larger impact of social networking is that we are becoming connected to one another in one way or another on the Web. One can even argue that the entire World Wide Web is a social network. However, specifically social networking sites are directly expanding the idea of sharing content and expanding links .
The author of the blog post linked above, touches upon an interesting point, that we are being watched carefully and connected through our observed preferences. Surely, we are making networks of our preferences. Knowing our preferences means big money for competing companies. Hence, the on-going competition between websites can be seen with a number of websites such as Friendster, Facebook, MySpace, etc… It is apparent that members of social networks are not the only ones benefiting from them, but surely the owners of the websites have their own motives. Finding out our preferences and what we’d like to spend money on, allows the owners of the websites to make “spending” options available on their site with little effort from their end.
Very intertesting.
Social Networking allows an abundance of opportunities for businesses to leverage their marketing dollars in hopes of collecting major dividends. The sheer numbers of sites like My space where hundreds of thousands of users are online at any given time presents opportunities for vendors to push users to point of sale for their specific product offerings.
what bother me about all this social networking is the tracking cookies that are attached to all the different sites. everywhere you go on the web is being reported back to some marketing agency collecting the data. Lets say you research a medical problem you have. you are careful not talk about the problem. but once you look on the web to research your medical problem it could now be in the hands of a marketing agency. there are so mamy sites that have harmful cookies. i compared mortgage rates online within on day i received 5 phone calls for morgage agencies and many emails.
website to get unhooked from harmful cookies
http://www.worldprivacyforum.org/cookieoptout.htm