Social Networking and Categorizing
Yesterday, my feed reader spat out this interesting tidbit where some folks out of Palo Alto made a map of every IP address available online at http://thewholeinternet.wordtothewise.com/.
I’ve been doing a social networking experiment with social networking online. Yesterday, I took one of my email addresses and signed up for every social network out there and created free profiles or blogs and then linked them all back here. No, it’s not some elaborate link baiting scheme. It’s just a test to see what actually drives referals from social networks. It immediately drove my search rankings. Most of the networks out there are somewhat useless unless your own real social network participates. I think that my best advice to most people who want to market themselves is to take up a hobby and attend some public events. Nothing works like meeting people in person and for the most part no one takes anything very seriously online. Most of them want to do it anonymously so they can be fun but lack any real substance. I am more interested in how folks are categorizing information online.
This video was the inspiration for my little link experiment and to start editing Wikipedia pages. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Windhamdavid ) The video attempts to compare the how information is categorized online. The phrase that inspired my little link publishing bonanza was “There is no shelf, the links alone are enough” is highlighted several times throughout the video. I think the author of the video is making a great point about how information will be organized online.
Because this website is a ‘virtual shelf’, I can lead engines to and from other sites which in a way helps organize the the information online. However, because I’m quite bit unacademic and half hearted in my publishing efforts, I’m not sure the word organizing is appropriate. It might be closer to disorganizing. As software makes it easier to publish online and the more ‘social networking’ sites proliferate, the more that common users will dominate how the information on the internet is organized. I’m pretty sure that the it’s going to be a giant mess across most of the internet.
Ran across an update to the original every IP address available online at the top of this article. I also noticed the the original link is now dead which emphasizes the ‘mess’ I concluded the post on. Here is an updated article:
Simonite, T. (2013). What Happened When One Man Pinged the Whole Internet. Retrieved September 09, 2016, from https://www.technologyreview.com/s/514066/what-happened-when-one-man-pinged-the-whole-internet/