Jess’ E-Learning Blog

It’s kind of ironic; social software is as much about disseminating information as it is about consolidating it. An individual site can act as both spreader and combiner, such as del.icio.us. For the individual user, delicious acts as a consolidation tool to organize and have in one place all the websites which the user may need now or in the future. However, at the same time, the user is broadcasting their pages to other users and thus is spreading information around. Users can subscribe to other users’ pages and therefore be privy to their listings. In the same way, Netvibes acts both as a consolidator and a disseminator with it’s new feature “netvibes ginger”. While the old version of Netvibes acted as an aggregator which only the user could  see (unless they allowed another user to see it) Netvibes Ginger gives each user both a private and a public page. So while the aggregator is, by nature, a consolidator of information from several websites, it is now also a disseminator in that other users can access your information as well and use it on their own aggregators.