Legal Research

Are Lists of Website Links Too Web 1.0?

By Ted Tjaden

Colleague Elizabeth Ellis blogged here last month on the advantage that SharePoint provides with distributed content: the idea that you can build a list of links to websites in a single source and then have SharePoint use that data to harvest the information, filter it by category (e.g., Litigation) and display it to the appropriate group within your organization.

I wholeheartedly agree with this, but having been several months behind Elizabeth on a similar project, the cynical part of me starts to ask (after just adding to my list the 650th URL): do users actually use lists of website links on an intranet?

I realize it would be unorthodox to not include such lists of links. And I assume such lists are valuable for users who like to browse their options by organized categories, but I rarely use them myself, prefering web browser favourites/bookmarks or simply searching the Google search box built into my web browser (i.e., it is easier and quicker to type “CBC news” in the Google box and hit enter than it is to browse through favourites or link lists to find the appropriate link).

What are other organizations doing? I was surprised to not easily find much in the literature on this topic (unless I was missing something; I am aware of “social bookmarking” but that has not appealed to me that much). Will link lists go the way of the dodo bird?

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on May 21, 2008 (boomark / email).