You Are What You Link
I had originally titled this post, “You Are Your Tag Cloud.” I got to thinking about how revealing a person’s personal bookmarks can be about their interests, personality, and surfing habits. For social media, this is a good thing. These are the revelations we’re looking for. What are you into? What can you share with others in a meaningful way?
A tag cloud, in case you’re wondering, is a visual collection of all the words you associate with all your collected bookmarks on a social bookmarking site like Delicious. You can view my tag cloud here on the right side of the page. Over time it really grows into something as unique as a fingerprint. A webprint, perhaps?
I could see a dark cloud rolling in for public bookmarking. While it’s possible to retain some anonymity through craft user names, chances are there is some overlap for most people with other accounts that would be relatively easy to trace. With the information engines churning 24/7 it’s not hard to imagine systems that make fairly accurate assumptions about other sites we’re on. Since many people use only a couple of user names or passwords for all their Internet accounts, figuring out people’s real identities is only going to get easier the farther we can trace things back.
I’d be curious to know if much quantitative study has been done on bookmarks and how they correspond to behavior or personality. Mimicking these qualities will soon be as necessary a component to identify theft as ID and account numbers. Perhaps this our social media identity.
On a tamer level, I’m surprised marketers haven’t made more use of this. Or perhaps they do and we’re not aware. To some extent, good marketing depends on knowing as much as one can about the consumer’s interest. But where is the line drawn? And to what extent to social bookmarking sites and search engines who retain this data play a role in governing the future use or impact of the time-shifted monitoring of online behavior?
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Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web |
