Posted on Friday 6th of October 2006 at 13:27 in The Internet

Social Book-Marking Helps Kill Sheltered Browsing

It's often been a thought of mine that "sheltered browsing" is having a negative affect on the internet and is certainly something that I am guilty of. Sheltered browsing is where you have a few sites that you frequent but rarely browse beyond, limiting your entire internet needs to a few select providers. For me this was a couple of forums, a football website, TomsHardware, Ebuyer and a few others, but basically the internet could have stopped existing and I wouldn't really be any the wiser.

I did browse more than those few sites but it makes a valid point, that remaining so sheltered limits the amount of information you can consume, and therein lies the saviour: social book marking.

Social book marking allows a largely unstructured bundle of content to be thrown in front of you, for example, at Digg you may be looking in the Linux/Unix category but you are still exposed to a massive variety. This variety widens your field of vision, guiding you to entirely new content that you would not have found reading your conventional haunts. This is especially important for those of you who don't work in an environment where your colleagues share new technologies and general "interesting" things.

Help Webmasters
Social book marking sites present you with a multitude of content that someone else has deemed interesting, pushing you towards websites that you would not usually view and this offers multiple benefits. Not only does it allow webmasters to attempt to generate traffic (and regular readers) but it offers intellectual benefits for the browser. Sheltered browsing stops webmasters of newer sites (including this one, so technically this is a biased view) from gaining a substantial readership, resulting in no motivation to keep the site running and we all know where that leads.

Broaden Your Horizons
Social book marking is good, it broadens your horizons and presents you with fresh material that is sometimes hard to find naturally. Sheltered browsing is all too easy to slip into, so if you're not being sent in all directions by friends/colleagues/forum-people then maybe you should join somewhere like Digg and see how many more topics of conversation suddenly become available to you.

Obviously, if you're here because of Digg then my theory is correct. Social book marking puts more traffic in the direction of newer webmasters and for that, I thank you =)

 

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