The Ground is Swelling and We're All Sinking

Well, I said it in a recent post, PR is all about using buzzwords, and there's a new buzzword for the day: groundswell.

After some Googling, I came across Lindy Dreyer's blog, and more specifically a post about Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff's book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Media (AKA Jujitsu Manual for Managers). Dreyer uses Li and Bernoff's explanation of the term groundswell, defining it as "a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations".

In light of my recent rampant use of the social bookmarking site delicious, I thought I'd see how well this term applies to me and how I come to bookmark and read the sites that I do.

For those who don't use delicious, preferring to bookmark on their own computers instead of online, the site is exactly as advertised: it's a site that allows you to store and organize your bookmarks. You can attach tags to each site, which in turn allows you to sort your links by subject. By clicking on the displayed number of people who have bookmarked a certain site, you can read anyone else's profile and see what people like-minded to you are bookmarking.

My delicious site is filled with links to branches of NASA, science blogs and information databases. Most of these sites are things that I have bookmarked on my own computer. When I started using delicious, I clicked on a few of my sites to see who else had them bookmarked and did look through other user's profiles. I found some sweet things. I found a site about the history of the Apollo guidance computer and a full book online about Kennedy's choice to send America to the moon (something which I always wanted to write!).

The downside to this, though, is that you're limiting yourself as soon as you click on one of your sites. When I clicked to see who else had bookmarked NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory site, I was looking for bookmarks relating to my own interests. It's hard to make yourself step out of the box and really seek out things worth reading that are new to you. Furthermore (though I think this relies more to books than websites since you're not really paying for a website), how do you know what's going to be good, and what's going to be a waste of your time?

In situations like these, I still rely on friends. I leave the confines of my computer desk and call someone I know who's deeply involved in Physics, or Evolution, or Theatre Arts. I can tell them what I'm looking for and, really, they're in the best position to tell me where to find what I want.

In this way, and so many others, I don't think human-to-human interaction can really be replaced by the internet or other social media means of gathering information. When it comes right down to it, no one wants to waste their time looking for the perfect book or website when they could ask a friend or colleague and start reading it right away.