Mail & Guardian Raising the Bar
The Mail & Guardian Online, Africa’s self-proclaimed first online newspaper, has made an interesting move by including social (or Web 2.0) tagging and bookmarking tools at the end of their articles. See image below:
It is really encouraging to see a site like M&G Online, built on content supplied from traditional or mainstream media sources. engaging the social media juggernaut. It’s not an easy move, as words like ‘blog’, ‘Technorati’ and ‘del.icio.us’ could intimidate or confuse the average Web user. As a Web 2.0 enthusiast, social media advocate and all round pseudo-geek, I am deeply impressed by the move and will most certainly be using the tools to spread M&G news through my personal network. These moves also add to the mobility of M&G content – I can subscribe to an RSS feed for articles, have it delivered to my RSS reader of choice (www.bloglines.com) and access that from my mobile phone along with all my other resources.
My only hesitation is the realisation that social bookmarking and folksonomy are still fringe concepts and not necessarily intuitive enough for the average web user to take full advantage of. I would encourage M&G Online to provide some reeeaaally basic step-by-step explanations and walkthroughs for Technorati and del.icio.us on the site. Not only will it improve the usage of the tools on the site, but extend M&G’s global reach, and make it a search target for users looking to find easy explanations for fairly complex, but incredibly useful, social software.
