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How Does Social Bookmarking Work? |
Social bookmarking gives users the ability to
express differing perspectives on information and resources
through informal organized structures. This process provides
like-minded people a way to find one another and create new communities of users that continue to influence the ongoing evolution
of online resource organization. Using a Social Bookmarking 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 fishing,
for example, you might find that other users saw a connection
between fishing and camping, taking you in new, potentially
valuable directions. These kinds of tools also encourage users
to keep coming back because the groups and the collections of resources are constantly changing. It’s simple to see that
assigning a value for individual resources results in a system that functions as a user-based ranking filter.
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What are the Benefits of Social Bookmarking? |
Social bookmarking opens the door to new ways of organizing
and ranking information. The creator of a social bookmark assigns tags to each web page, resulting in a user-directed system 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 people
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 to that tag. In this way, the community of people over
time will develop a unique structure of keywords to define resources.
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What is the Downside to Social Bookmarking? |
The downside is that social bookmarking can be done by anyone. 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
painting but only tags the site with the term “paint” and
not also with “types of paint” or perhaps “painting tips,” that resource might
never be found by a person looking for information on painting. Because social bookmarking reflects the values of the
community of members, there is a risk of presenting a skewed view
of the value of any particular topic. For example, someone might
assign erroneous tags to certain resources. In addition, social
bookmarking means storing data in yet another location that you
have to maintain and update.
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Could this be the Future of Information Classification? |
The technology behind social bookmarking is not complex,
which means the threshold to participate is low, both for Web
sites offering bookmarking services and for those people using them. The ideas that social
bookmarking has built have started to work their way into other applications; the practice of tagging information is being used to organize and rank
other types of resources, such as video, images and e-mail.
This shift away from traditional classification systems may have important
implications for how user communities are created and
function. As the world of online resources evolves and new
systems of classifying that information are born and mature, the
design and function of databases themselves may ultimately be
changed to accommodate new ways of managing information.
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Top Social Bookmarking Services |
Digg.com
Technorati.com
del.icio.us
Propeller.com
StumbleUpon.com
