Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Social
bookmarking is a method for Internet users to
organize, store, manage and search forbookmarks of resources online.
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 as folksonomies.
Common features
Descriptions
may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so users may
understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for
themselves. Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favour of or
against its quality, or tags that collectively
or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social
tagging, "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of
keywords to shared content".[1]
In
a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to
remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved
privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside
certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The
allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or
tags, or via a search engine.
Most
social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with
informal tagsinstead of
the traditional browser-based system of folders. They also enable
viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about
the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking
services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters
of tags or bookmarks.
Many
social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of
bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become
aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.
As
these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra
features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and
export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or
other social network features.[2]
History
The
concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of
itList,[3] the features of which included
public and private bookmarks.[4] 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.[5][6] They provided
folders for organizing bookmarks, and some services automatically sorted
bookmarks into folders (with varying degrees of accuracy).[7] Blink included
browser buttons for saving bookmarks;[8] Backflip enabled users to email
their bookmarks to others[9] and displayed
"Backflip this page" buttons on partner websites.[10]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".[11] 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."[12]
Founded
in 2003, Delicious (then called del.icio.us) pioneered tagging[13] and coined the
term social bookmarking. In 2004, as Delicious began to take off,
similar services Furl and Simpy were
released, along with Citeulike and Connotea (sometimes called social
citation services) and the related recommendation system Stumbleupon. In 2006, Ma.gnolia (later
renamed to Gnolia), Blue Dot (later
renamed to Faves), Mister Wong, and Diigo entered
the bookmarking field, and Connectbeam included a social bookmarking
and tagging service aimed at businesses and enterprises. In 2007, IBM released its Lotus Connections product.[14] In 2009, Pinboard launched
as a bookmarking service with paid accounts.[15] As of 2011, Furl,
Simpy, Gnolia, and Faves are no longer active services.
Digg was founded in 2004 with a related system for sharing and
ranking social news,
followed withReddit in 2005 and Newsvine in 2006.
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.[16] 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 stable power lawdistributions.[16]. Once such stable
distributions form, the correlations 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.[17] 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
of crowdsourcing.
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 a controlled 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/antonym confusion,
unorthodox and personalized tag schemata from some users, and no mechanism for
users to indicate hierarchicalrelationships
between tags (e.g., a site might be labeled as both cheese and cheddar,
with no mechanism that might indicate that cheddar is a
refinement or sub-class of cheese).
Uses
For
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. Libraries have found social bookmarking to be
useful as an easy way to provide lists of informative links to patrons.[18]
Enterprise bookmarking
Comparison with search engines
With
regard to creating a high-quality search engine, a social bookmarking system
has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and
classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based
classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human
beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software,
which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. Also,
people can find and bookmark web pages that have not yet been noticed or
indexed by web spiders.[19] Additionally, a social
bookmarking system can rank a resource based on how many times it has been
bookmarked by users, which may be a more useful metric for end-users than systems that
rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it (although
both types of ranking are vulnerable to fraud, and both need technical
countermeasures to try to deal with this).
Abuse
Social
bookmarking can also be susceptible to corruption and collusion.[20] Due to its
popularity, some people have started considering it as a tool to use along
with search engine
optimization to make their
website more visible. The more often a web page is submitted and tagged, the
better chance it has of being found. Spammers have started
bookmarking the same web page multiple times and/or tagging each page of their
web site using a lot of popular tags, obliging developers to constantly adjust
their security system to overcome abuses.[21]
See also
posted by Om Joshi @ 01:25
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