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://em
ily.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 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).
>
>
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