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Depth First Browsing or Breadth First Browsing?

World Wide Web offers a new way of reading and organizing materials. You don't have to follow a certain path like when you're reading a conventional (paper-based) books. This feature can help or lost you.

In the early years of WWW, I didn't really care about it. There were not many good materials worth serious reading. Now, things have changed. There are many good articles to read and ponder. When I read slashdot, for example, there are many good links with good articles. I am overloaded with information.

To follow these good links and articles, I could pick a topik and follow it to the "bottom". Of course there is no bottom in world wide web. Let's define the bottom is a place where you have enough of the topic. (If you have a better definition, let me know.) This is what I call "Depth First Browsing" (DFB).

Another way to browse is to collect everything that you are interested with and start scanning these topics, the "Breadth First Browsing" (BFB). Yang can organize things that you want to visit in new windows or new tabs, depending on your browser capabilities and your preference. You then explore the many topics at once worrying that if you don't explore them right now they will be gone, or to be exact forgotten by you. The information is still there, but you forgot the location. Or, some of you may bookmarks those topics and visit them later when you have more time (yeah right).

Now, which method do you usually do? Tell me by entering your comments in this blog. I personally do Breadth First Browsing by opening many tabs in my Mozilla Firefox.

Would this be an interesting topic to research?

Comments

Budi Rahardjo said…
Based on responses that I got, this BFB (Breadth First Browsing) is apparently the most common way. I still cannot generalize this since perhaps most people who responded are "power users".
Harry Sufehmi said…
Sometimes I do both - example: I noticed an interesting article in Slashdot. I opened another tab in Firefox and do a Google on the topic, and open new tabs on the interesting links.

While the links are loading, I continue reading the original article. I open interesting comments into new tabs.

When done, then it's time to store the new knowledge. If it's IT related, then it's stored (published) in pangsit.comAnything else get posted in my diaryOr if the topic is very interesting and made me do further research on it, usually it'll be published in my personal website as a project or article. If it's IT related, it'll be linked from pangsit.com

Therefore when I need it in the future, I only need to search pangsit.com / my diary.
tvashtar said…
I blogged about this a while back too
http://tvashtar.blogspot.com/2007/05/ie7-firefox-and-state-space-search.html

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