Social bookmarking
Delicious homepage in October 2012, an example of a social bookmarking website.
A social bookmarking service is a centralized online service which enables users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents.[1]Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996;Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social bookmarking" and "tagging". Tagging is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, enabling users to organize their bookmarks in flexible ways and develop shared vocabularies known asfolksonomies.
Common features
History
A user page on del.icio.us in May 2004, displaying bookmarks with tags.
The concept of shared online bookmarks is believed to have originated in around April 1996 with the launch of itList,[4] the features of which included public and private bookmarks.[5] Another system known as WebTagger, developed by a team at the Computational Sciences Division at NASA, was presented at the Sixth International WWW Conference held in Santa Clara on April 7–11, 1997. WebTagger included several advanced social bookmarking features including the ability to collaboratively share and organize bookmarks using a web-based interface, provide comments and organize them according to categories.[6] Within the next three years, online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies such as Backflip, Blink, Clip2, ClickMarks, HotLinks, and others entering the market.[7][8] They provided folders for organizing bookmarks, and some services automatically sorted bookmarks into folders (with varying degrees of accuracy).[9] Blink included browser buttons for saving bookmarks;[10]Backflip enabled users to email their bookmarks to others[11] and displayed "Backflip this page" buttons on partner websites.[12] Lacking viable revenue models, this early generation of social bookmarking companies failed as thedot-com bubble burst — Backflip closed citing "economic woes at the start of the 21st century".[13] In 2005, the founder of Blink said, "I don't think it was that we were 'too early' or that we got killed when the bubble burst. I believe it all came down to product design, and to some very slight differences in approach."[14]
Founded in 2003, Delicious (then called del.icio.us) pioneered tagging[15] and coined the term social bookmarking. Frassle, a blogging system released in November 2003, included social bookmarking elements.[16] In 2004, as Delicious began to take off, similar services Furl, Simpy, Spurl.net, and unalog were released,[16] along withCiteULike and Connotea (sometimes called social citation services) and the related recommendation systemStumbleupon. Also in 2004, the social photo sharing website Flickr was released, and inspired by Delicious it soon added a tagging feature.[17] In 2006, Ma.gnolia (later renamed toGnolia), Blue Dot (later renamed toFaves), Mister Wong, and Diigo entered the bookmarking field, andConnectbeam included a social bookmarking and tagging service aimed at businesses and enterprises. In 2007,IBM released its Lotus Connectionsproduct.[18] In 2009, Pinboard launched as a bookmarking service with paid accounts.[19] As of 2012, Furl, Simpy, Spurl.net, Gnolia, Faves, and Connectbeam are no longer active services.
Folksonomy
Main article: Folksonomy
A simple form of shared vocabularies does emerge in social bookmarking systems (folksonomy). Collaborative tagging exhibits a form of complex systems (or self-organizing) dynamics.[23] Although there is no central controlled vocabulary to constrain the actions of individual users, the distributions of tags that describe different resources have been shown to converge over time to stablepower law distributions.[23] Once such stable distributions form, thecorrelations between different tags can be examined to construct simple folksonomy graphs, which can be efficiently partitioned to obtain a form of community or shared vocabularies.[24]While such vocabularies suffer from some of the informality problems described below, they can be seen as emerging from the decentralized actions of many users, as a form ofcrowdsourcing.
From the point of view of search data, there are drawbacks to such tag-based systems: no standard set of keywords (i.e., a folksonomy instead of acontrolled vocabulary), no standard for the structure of such tags (e.g., singular vs. plural, capitalization), mistagging due to spelling errors, tags that can have more than one meaning, unclear tags due to synonym/antonymconfusion, unorthodox and personalized tag schemata from some users, and no mechanism for users to indicatehierarchical relationships between tags (e.g., a site might be labeled as bothcheese and cheddar, with no mechanism that might indicate that cheddar is a refinement or sub-class of cheese).
Uses
For individual users, social bookmarking can be useful as a way to access a consolidated set of bookmarks from various computers, organize large numbers of bookmarks, and share bookmarks with contacts. Institutions including businesses, libraries, and universities have used social bookmarking as a way to increase information sharing among members. Social bookmarking has been also used to improve web search.[25][26]
Enterprise bookmarking
Main article: Enterprise bookmarking
Libraries using social bookmarking
Libraries have found social bookmarking to be useful as an easy way to provide lists of informative links to patrons.[27] The University of Pennsylvania (UP) was one of the first library adopters with its PennTags.[28]
Social bookmarking for education
Social bookmarking tools are an emerging educational technology that has been drawing more of educators' attention over the last several years. This technology offers knowledge sharing solutions and a social platform for interactions and discussions. These tools enable users to collaboratively underline, highlight, and annotate an electronic text, in addition to providing a mechanism to write additional comments on the margins of the electronic document.[29] For example, Delicious could be used in a course to provide an inexpensive answer to the question of rising course materials costs.[30] RISAL (Repository of Interactive Social Assets for Learning) is another social bookmarking system used for supporting teaching and learning at the university level.[31]
Social bookmarking tools have several purposes in an academic setting including: organizing and categorizing web pages for efficient retrieval; keeping tagged pages accessible from any networked computer; sharing needed or desired resources with other users; accessing tagged pages with RSS feeds, cell phones and PDAs for increased mobility; allowing librarians and instructors the capability to follow students' progress; and giving students another way to collaborate with each other and make collective discoveries.[32]
