Social Bookmarking. Can enough be said about social
bookmarking? Before the advent of social bookmarking, bookmarking web pages was
so…antisocial. And think back even further…when I was just a curious young boy
reading book like Harry Potter and Eragon for their mystical whimsy, I longed
for nothing but a friend with whom to bookmark pages. But alas, it wasn’t until
I signed up for the social bookmarking sites del.icio.us and diigo.com that
this lifelong dream was achieved. Luckily, with these tools I have found a
fellow bookmarker, a “bookmarking soul mate” if you will, who has scoured the
depths of the internet to find and bookmark anything and everything related
music.
Primus
Luta is a bookmarking monster. Since joining Diigo in 2008, he has 1284 public
bookmarks and almost 2,800 total! While he has tagged and bookmarked articles
of all kinds, he focuses on music and music performance technology – his top
tags include “album,” “Beatmaker,” “music,” and “live-performance.” When I
first saw these top tags, I got excited…then I said them out loud and they were
music to my ears. Yes, I did just waste a sentence to set up that crappy pun,
and I’m wasting another one confirming your suspicion.
Despite the abundance of his bookmarks and tags, however, they
are not very thorough – while I haven’t looked through ALL of his bookmarks, the
ones I’ve seen have tags but no comments, highlighting, or any other
organization. Obviously, social bookmarking tools carry a “to each his own” philosophy
– there is no established “proper” way to bookmark or tag. Looking at Luta’s
page, it seems like he is tagging mostly for himself and his own reference. But
I think his tagging is also a bit haphazard; with almost 3,000 pages
bookmarked, it would be very difficult for him to organize them for himself
with tags alone, much less for a larger public who would be viewing his
well-documented browsing history. I expect that once his number of bookmarks
got to a certain point it would become overwhelming, which possibly explains
why stopped bookmarking at the end of 2011.
Looking through his bookmarks, some very interesting pieces
stood out to me. Particularly, Luta found this gem,
which shows the historical and geographical origins of dance music in a
mesmerizingly visual way. You can click play to see the progression, but it
happens so fast that I would recommend slowly drawing your mouse from the left to
the right side of the screen to control the map yourself. It’s awesome to see
how much music and influence has traveled in the past 20 years in particular to
create our modern genre-defying perspective on music. Also interesting was this
LA Weekly article
about Blue Note’s departure from their jazz specialty for a foray into more
poppy music, and this Racialicious essay
about first-world pop musicians reference and treat issues of race and power.
I think these three examples give a great sense of Luta’s
social bookmarking tendencies. He covers a huge intersection of different items
relating to music, but to his credit, I have found every piece he has tagged to
be genuinely interesting, whether it covered a topic I am typically interested
in or not. I think Luta really gets it
– the fact that I found so many of his tags personally interesting and relevant
demonstrates that he has a great awareness of his audience, which I think I fit
into perfectly. His target audience is made up of people who are really into
music, but also have very broad musical awareness and levels expertise. Thus,
he bookmarks pages that are focused on specific aspects of music but are also
easily understood by any music fan. And if
I’m any judge, he’s pretty
successful at it.
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