Social bookmarking

Draft

Definitions

• Bookmarking in the context of ICT means to save a link in some place (e.g. the bookmarks manager of a web browser) and optionally add metadata (keywords, description, title, ..).

There are several forms of shared (or social) bookmarking:

(1) “Social bookmarking is a web based service, where shared lists of user-created Internet bookmarks are displayed. Social bookmarking sites generally organize their content using tags. Social bookmarking sites are an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags.” (Wikipedia)

Social bookmarking is a kind of social software that can be associated with Web 2.0 and that uses some kind of folksonomic tagging system.

(2) On the opposite, Links managers (e.g. directories like DMOZ) is a kind of social software that is associated with pre-web 2.0. The taxonomy is made by the system administrateors and users just add links. Of course, one could imagine that users were also given permission to add categories.

(3) There are some more individual tools that allow some form of sharing or exporint.

(4) Specialized tools exist for very specific kinds of links.

• E.g. reference managers

Social bookmarking vs. Links managers

• Social bookmarking is faster, but messier

• Links managers are more organized, but suffer from hierarchical browsing. Better sites like DMOZ or Yahoo provide at least aliases that allow to put subcategories within several categories. This is not the case with simple systems, e.g. the links manager of PostNuke.

In educational websites, it is probably best to use link managers:

• if you wish to to provide clear and stable links hierarchy
• if you have to order resources for well defined subject areas
• if most entries are teacher made (who carefully selects them)

It is probably a better idea to use folksonomies:

• if you ask students to collect loads of links
• if you have a hard time figuring out where to "put things".

A compromise is to agree on a set of terms (e.g. on a wiki page)

See also: the discussion in tagging.

Examples

• Del.icio.us (Wikipedia entry) is today's most popular social bookmarking site.

• de.lirio.us is an open source clone.

• DMoz is the best Yahoo-like directory project.

Links

• Large list of free bookmark managers