Social Bookmarking
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.
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.”
What are the downsides?
By definition, 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.
Delicious is a Social Bookmarking service, which means you can save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. It also means that we can show you the most popular bookmarks being saved right now across many areas of interest. In addition, our search and tagging tools help you keep track of your entire bookmark collection and find tasty new bookmarks from people like you.
What the video teaches
"Social Bookmarking in Plain English" introduces the basics of bookmarking services like Delicious.com. The video uses an example of teachers using Social Bookmarking to share links to useful websites. The video includes:
The difference between online and offline bookmarks
How to use a bookmarking website
An introduction to organizing bookmarks with tags
The value of sharing bookmarks with others
My de.licio.us has been posted to my iGoogle site.
Resources
Common Craft. (August 8, 2007). Social bookmarking in plain English. Retrieved November 28, 2009, from http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english
Educause. (May, 2005). 7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking. Retrieved November 28, 2009, from educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf
Yahoo. (2009). Learn More about Delicious. Retrieved November 28, 2009, from http://delicious.com/help/learn
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