Social Bookmarking

Seven things you need to know about social book marking.

What is it?

Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a
public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. Bookmarking,
on the other hand, is the practice of saving the address of
a Web site you wish to visit in the future on your computer. To
create a collection of social bookmarks, you register with a social
bookmarking site, which lets you store bookmarks, add tags of
your choice, and designate individual bookmarks as public or
private. Some sites periodically verify that bookmarks still work,
notifying users when a URL no longer functions. Visitors to social
bookmarking sites can search for resources by keyword, person,
or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification
schemes that registered users have created and saved.

Who is doing it?

Social Bookmarking dates back just a couple of years, when sites
like Furl, Simpy, and del.icio.us began operating. Other social
bookmarking sites include de.lirio.us, an open source version of
del.icio.us, and citeulike, a social bookmarking site for academic
papers. Social bookmarking is particularly useful when collecting
a set of resources that are to be shared with others. Anyone can
participate in social bookmarking.

How Does it work?

Social bookmarking opens the door to new ways of organizing
information and categorizing resources. The creator of a bookmark
assigns tags to each resource, resulting in a user-directed,
“amateur” method of classifying information. Because social
bookmarking services indicate who created each bookmark and
provide access to that person’s other bookmarked resources,
users can easily make social connections with other individuals
interested in just about any topic. Users can also see how many
people have used a tag and search for all resources that have
been assigned that tag. In this way, the community of users over
time will develop a unique structure of keywords to define resources—
something that has come to be known as a “folksonomy.”


Why is it significant?

Activities like social bookmarking give users the opportunity to
express differing perspectives on information and resources
through informal organizational structures. This process allows
like-minded individuals to find one another and create new communities
of users that continue to influence the ongoing evolution
of folksonomies and common tags for resources. Using a folksonomy-
based tool for research lets you take advantage of the
insights of other users to find information related to the topic you
are researching, even in areas that aren’t obviously connected to
the primary topic. If you are looking for information about sailing,
for example, you might find that other users saw a connection
between sailing and boat repair, taking you in new, potentially
valuable directions. These kinds of tools also encourage users
to keep coming back because the folksonomy and the collections
of resources are constantly changing. It’s easy to imagine
assigning a value for individual resources, resulting in a ranking
system that functions as a collaborative filter.


What are the downsides?

By defination social bookmarking is done by amateurs. There is
no oversight as to how resources are organized and tagged. This
can lead to inconsistent or otherwise poor use of tags. For example,
if a user saves a bookmark for a site with information about
greyhounds but only tags the site with the term “greyhound” and
not also with “dogs” or perhaps “dog racing,” that resource might
never be found by someone looking for information about breeds
of dogs. Because social bookmarking reflects the values of the
community of users, there is a risk of presenting a skewed view
of the value of any particular topic. For example, users might
assign pejorative tags to certain resources. In addition, social
bookmarking means storing data in yet another location that you
have to maintain and update.


Where is it going?

The technology behind social bookmarking is not complex,
which means the threshold to participate is low, both for Web
sites offering such services and for users. The ideas that social
bookmarking is built on are working their way into other applications;
the practice of tagging information is being extended to
other types of resources, such as multimedia files and e-mail.
This shift away from formal taxonomies may have important
implications for how user communities are born and how they
function. As the landscape for online resources changes and new
systems of classifying those resources emerge and mature, the
design and function of databases themselves may ultimately be
changed to accommodate new ways of managing information.


What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Tagging Information resources with keywords has the potential to
change how we store and find information. It may become less
important to know and remember where information was found
and more important to know how to retrieve it using a framework
created by and shared with peers and colleagues. Social
bookmarking simplifies the distribution of reference lists, bibliographies,
papers, and other resources among peers or students.