Six Kinds of (Social) Searching

Librarians need to be aware of social searching. It's important and it's here to stay. What makes social searching so integral for librarians' information retrieval skills is that it requires knowledge of Web 2.0 (mashups, wisdom of crowds, long tail, etc.) It doesn't mean that "traditional" search skills are obsolete. Far from it. Rather, social searching just adds another layer in the librarian's toolkit. Here are some of my favourites.

1. Social Q&A sites - Cha Cha, Live QnA, Yahoo! Answers, Answer Bag, Wondir

2. Shared bookmarks and web pages - Del.icio.us, Shadows, Yahoo's MyWeb, Furl, Diigo, Connotea

3. Collaborative directories - Open Directory Project, Prefound, Zimbio, Wikipedia

4. Taggregators - Technorati, Bloglines, Wikipedia

5. Personalized verticals - PogoFrog, Eurekster, Rollyo

6. Collaborative harvesters - iRazoo, Digg, Flickr, Youtube, Netscape, Reddit, Tailrank, popurls.com