My Social Bookmarking Soul-tag

Last night I perused both Diigo and Delicious to try to find my Social Bookmarking Soulmate. The first tags I tried, “online participatory culture,” and “participatory culture,” turned up zilch, and just “fandom” presented me with a lot of actual fan-created content that really isn’t of any use for me, neither for this blog nor for all my intents and purposes as a fan.

Only when I finally typed “fandom academia” into the Delicious ‘search tags’ box was I able to come up with some useful links. Notice however it actually retrieved links which users had saved with the separate tags of “fandom” and “academia,” rather than “fandom academia,” which explains why some of the links sometimes lean one way or the other in terms of relevance to my search. However, it came up with 118 entries, and luckily for me the articles that were of most use to me seemed to show up on the first few pages on results.

Actually, a  surprising amount of the links that came up had “Henry Jenkins” as a tag, and a pretty good amount didn’t even link to his actual blog (although the ones that did were super interesting), but to blogs of people simply discussing the topic of participatory culture and new media in relation to fandom, which is super helpful.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find anybody with similar enough interests and relevant links whom I could adequately and deservingly label as my Social Bookmarking Soulmate. However, I looked at their saved links and if they had more than five bookmarks which were related to my blog topic and interests, I followed them on Delicious.

A lot of the users who had saved the pages that were of interest me were online fans, and many of their links were to actual fan-works (fan wikis, episode guides, discussions, etc.), which doesn’t really do anything for me. But besides that, many had links to articles commenting on some particular phenomenon in fandom, studying a particular fandom through a pseudo-academic lens (here is a site entirely related to academic work on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom), or maybe introducing fandom subculture to the mainstream audience.

But for some of the users which had bookmarked these pages, when looking at their other saved pages, you wouldn’t immediately assume they were online fans. Many had bookmarked articles about Web 2.0, new media developments, a LOT of articles about blogging (how to improve readership, start making money off their blogs, and just the blog literary genre in general), links to articles about and works by communication theorists such as Stuart Hall, articles on how to effectively use social media (in business, professional uses, personal uses), social media digital marketing, discussions around online anonymity and social relationships ("Are real names required for socializing?"), and a surprising number or articles about new social media that somehow involved gender and feminism (“Is Google+ sexist?”).

After several hours of virulent clicking and opening new tabs everywhere, the tag “fandom academia” seems to me to be associated with a large mix of users: many of them bloggers, some developers and marketers, some creative writers, and many fans simply interested in the objective take on fandom and what the mainstream media has to say about fans and their activities.

Although it was really frustrating at the time, I’m pleased at what I found as a result of engaging in social bookmarking. I’ve seen the Delicious site being linked to in my fandoms since maybe 2010, and my best friend from home—who’s always two steps ahead of me in terms of  everything participatory culture-, social media-, and fandom-related— was always telling me to get an account. And I think I even did sign up for a Delicious account at one point, but I just didn’t get when or how to use it. But I’m really glad I finally did this, because I can definitely see how it’s so much more efficient than just bookmarking things on my regular browser.

Plus, I’m way too lazy to make folders and organize all my bookmarks as I bookmark them.