I have been listening to John Battelle’s book “The Search” at the same time I am working on my social bookmarking project. Sometimes I arrive at insights simply as a function of the ideas that happen to be active “in my head” at a given point in time and this may be one of those times. The question I am asking myself is “why would access to social bookmarking lists” be of any value when a Google search would allow me immediate access to sites in response to a specific question I might pose. How could the “short and general list” provided by someone else be useful?
Battelle describes a distinction between web recovery and web discovery (he may not be the originator of this distinction but I heard it first from his book). When I search as an example of web recovery, I assume there is a web resource that provides information relevant to a question I have and I simply use a search site as a way to recover that inforamtion. In contrast, web discovery implies an experience with intriguing information when one has no specific question in mind. For example, some commercial sites let you know that other customers who purchased the same product you just purchased also purchased certain other products. This technique works because the method presents you with relevant information you did not have a specific need to find. It creates a possibility when you were not searching for one.
Examining the bookmark lists of others with similar interests provides the opportunity to identify resources you were not looking for, but possibly resources of relevance nonetheless. Maybe it is a way to discover the questions you should be asking.
