Social bookmarking

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Social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. [1] [2] 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, allowing users to organize their bookmarks and develop shared vocabularies known as folksonomies.

Contents

Common features

Unlike file sharing, social bookmarking does not save the resources themselves, merely bookmarks that reference them, i.e. a link to the bookmarked page. 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 favor 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". [3]

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 tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. 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. It also helps to promote your sites by networking with other social book markers and collaborating with each other.

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. [4]

History

A user page on del.icio.us in May 2004, displaying bookmarks with tags. Screenshot of Delicious in 2004.jpg
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 around April 1996 with the launch of itList, [5] the features of which included public and private bookmarks. [6] 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. [7] 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. [8] [9] They provided folders for organizing bookmarks, and some services automatically sorted bookmarks into folders (with varying degrees of accuracy). [10] Blink included browser buttons for saving bookmarks; [11] Backflip enabled users to email their bookmarks to others [12] and displayed "Backflip this page" buttons on partner websites. [13] Lacking viable revenue models, this early generation of social bookmarking companies failed as the dot-com bubble burst—Backflip closed citing "economic woes at the start of the 21st century". [14] 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." [15]

Founded in 2003, Delicious (then called del.icio.us) pioneered tagging [16] and coined the term social bookmarking. Frassle, a blogging system released in November 2003, included social bookmarking elements. [17] In 2004, as Delicious began to take off, similar services Furl, Simpy, Spurl.net, and unalog were released, [17] along with CiteULike and Connotea (sometimes called social citation services) and the related recommendation system Stumbleupon. Also in 2004, the social photo sharing website Flickr was released, and inspired by Delicious it soon added a tagging feature. [18] 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. [19] In 2009, Pinboard launched as a bookmarking service with paid accounts. [20] As of 2012, Furl, Simpy, Spurl.net, Gnolia, Faves, and Connectbeam are no longer active services.

Digg was founded in 2004[ citation needed ] with a related system for sharing and ranking social news, followed by competitors Reddit in 2005[ citation needed ] and Newsvine in 2006.[ citation needed ] As of January 20, 2016, Reddit is now the 32nd highest ranking in the world and Digg is no longer a social bookmarking platform and has dropped out of the top 1000.

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. [21] 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 law distributions. [21] 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. [22] 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 hierarchical relationships 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 cheeses).

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 also been used to improve web search. [23] [24]

Enterprise bookmarking

Unlike social bookmarking, where individuals can bookmark their favorite web resources to share those with the public on the internet, enterprise bookmarking is for knowledge management and sharing it within a specific network of an organization. Enterprise bookmarking is used by the users of an organization to tag, manage and share bookmarks on the web as well as the knowledge base of the organization's databases and file servers.

Libraries

Libraries have found social bookmarking to be useful as an easy way to provide lists of informative links to patrons. [25] The University of Pennsylvania (UP) was one of the first library adopters with its PennTags. [26] [27]

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. [28] For example, Delicious could be used in a course to provide an inexpensive answer to the question of rising course materials costs. [29] RISAL (Repository of Intean organization's users to manage and share bookmarks on the web and supporting teaching and learning at the university level. [30]

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 mobilan organization's users to tag, manage and share bookmarks on the web and giving students another way to collaborate with each other and make collective discoveries. [31]

One requirement unique to education is that resources often have one URL that describes the resource, with another for the actual learning content. XtLearn.net [32] allows bookmarking of both in one step, [33] the relevant URL being delivered to either tutors or learners, depending on the delivery context. It also demonstrates integration with traditional learning content repositories, such as Jorum, NLN, Intute and TES. [34]

Comparison with search engines

In comparison to search engines, 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 and quality of a resource. Also, people can find and bookmark web pages that have not yet been noticed or indexed by web spiders. [35] 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. However, both types of ranking are vulnerable to fraud, (see Gaming the system), and both need technical countermeasures to try to deal with this.

Abuse

Social bookmarking is susceptible to corruption and collusion. [17] Due to its popularity, some have begun to use 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, obligating developers to constantly adjust their security system to overcome abuses. [36] [37] Furthermore, since social bookmarking generates backlinks, social bookmark link generating services are used by some webmasters in an attempt to improve their websites' rankings in search engine results pages. [38] [39]

See also

Related Research Articles

Social software, also known as social apps or social platform includes communications and interactive tools that are often based on the Internet. Communication tools typically handle capturing, storing and presenting communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a pair or group of users. They focus on establishing and maintaining a connection among users, facilitating the mechanics of conversation and talk. Social software generally refers to software that makes collaborative behaviour, the organisation and moulding of communities, self-expression, social interaction and feedback possible for individuals. Another element of the existing definition of social software is that it allows for the structured mediation of opinion between people, in a centralized or self-regulating manner. The most improved area for social software is that Web 2.0 applications can all promote co-operation between people and the creation of online communities more than ever before. The opportunities offered by social software are instant connections and opportunities to learn.An additional defining feature of social software is that apart from interaction and collaboration, it aggregates the collective behaviour of its users, allowing not only crowds to learn from an individual but individuals to learn from the crowds as well. Hence, the interactions enabled by social software can be one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many.

BookmarkSync is an automatic synchronization service that allows users to access their bookmarks or favorites from any computer or web browser. The BookmarkSync client runs as a small program within the computer's system tray and it monitored the bookmarks in the user's browser, automatically uploading any changes to a central server. This allows one to keep browsers across separate synchronized computers. Cross-platform synchronization is possible by using the Mac OS X client.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Delicious (website)</span> Discontinued American social bookmarking web service

Delicious was a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs. Yahoo sold Delicious to AVOS Systems in April 2011, and the site relaunched in a "back to beta" state on September 27 that year. In May 2014, AVOS sold the site to Science Inc. In January 2016 Delicious Media, a new alliance, reported it had assumed control of the service.

Furl was a free social bookmarking website that allowed members to store searchable copies of webpages and share them with others. Every member received 5 gigabytes of storage space. The site was founded by Mike Giles in 2003 and purchased by LookSmart in September 2004. Diigo bought it from LookSmart in exchange for equity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Vander Wal</span>

Thomas Vander Wal is an information architect best known for coining the term "folksonomy". He is also known for initiating the term "infocloud". His work has primarily dealt with the Web and with information design and structure especially in the context of social technology.

Image sharing, or photo sharing, is the publishing or transfer of digital photos online. Image sharing websites offer services such as uploading, hosting, managing and sharing of photos. This function is provided through both websites and applications that facilitate the upload and display of images. The term can also be loosely applied to the use of online photo galleries that are set up and managed by individual users, including photoblogs. Sharing means that other users can view but not necessarily download images, and users can select different copyright options for their images.

CiteULike was a web service which allowed users to save and share citations to academic papers. Based on the principle of social bookmarking, the site worked to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers. In the same way that it is possible to catalog web pages or photographs, scientists could share citation information using CiteULike. Richard Cameron developed CiteULike in November 2004 and in 2006 Oversity Ltd. was established to develop and support CiteULike. In February 2019, CiteULike announced that it would be ceasing operations as of March 30, 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tag (metadata)</span> Keyword assigned to information

In information systems, a tag is a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information. This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system, although they may also be chosen from a controlled vocabulary.

Connotea was a free online reference management service for scientists, researchers, and clinicians, created in December 2004 by Nature Publishing Group and discontinued in March 2013. It was one of a breed of social bookmarking tools, similar to CiteULike and del.icio.us, where users can save links to their favourite websites. ReadCube is a similar free service that offers storage, annotation and sharing tools specifically for scientific documents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BibSonomy</span> Social bookmarking and publication-sharing system

BibSonomy is a social bookmarking and publication-sharing system. It aims to integrate the features of bookmarking systems as well as team-oriented publication management. BibSonomy offers users the ability to store and organize their bookmarks and publication entries and supports the integration of different communities and people by offering a social platform for literature exchange.

HCL Connections is a Web 2.0 enterprise social software application developed originally by IBM and acquired by HCL Technologies in July 2019. Connections is an enterprise-collaboration platform which aims to helps teams work more efficiently. Connections is part of HCL collaboration suite which also includes Notes / Domino, Sametime, Portal and Connections.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2collab</span>

2collab was a scientific social network launched by Elsevier in November 2007 and discontinued on 15 April 2011.

The steve.museum project was a collaborative effort to improve public access to and engagement with US art museum collections. It explored the possibilities of user-generated descriptions of works of art, also known as folksonomy. Project staff in 2011 comprised a group of volunteers, mostly from art museums, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as Archives & Museum Informatics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ApexKB</span>

ApexKB, is a discontinued free and open-source script for collaborative search and knowledge management powered by a shared enterprise bookmarking engine that is a fork of KnowledgebasePublisher. It was publicly announced on 29 September 2008. A stable version of Jumper was publicly released under the GNU General Public License and made available on SourceForge on 26 March 2009.

Enterprise bookmarking is a method for Web 2.0 users to tag, organize, store, and search bookmarks of both web pages on the Internet and data resources stored in a distributed database or fileserver. This is done collectively and collaboratively in a process by which users add tag (metadata) and knowledge tags.

Folksonomy is a classification system in which end users apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. Over time, this can give rise to a classification system based on those tags and how often they are applied or searched for, in contrast to a taxonomic classification designed by the owners of the content and specified when it is published. This practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. Folksonomy was originally "the result of personal free tagging of information [...] for one's own retrieval", but online sharing and interaction expanded it into collaborative forms. Social tagging is the application of tags in an open online environment where the tags of other users are available to others. Collaborative tagging is tagging performed by a group of users. This type of folksonomy is commonly used in cooperative and collaborative projects such as research, content repositories, and social bookmarking.

Collaborative tagging, also known as social tagging or folksonomy, allows users to apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. It has been argued that these tagging systems can provide navigational cues or "way-finders" for other users to explore information. The notion is that given that social tags are labels users create to represent topics extracted from online documents, the interpretation of these tags should allow other users to predict the contents of different documents efficiently. Social tags are arguably more important in exploratory search, in which the users may engage in iterative cycles of goal refinement and exploration of new information, and interpretation of information contents by others will provide useful cues for people to discover topics that are relevant.

Elium, previously referred to as Knowledge Plaza, is a Software as a Service used for enterprise knowledge sharing within organisations. It supports use cases for knowledge management, social bookmarking, document management, wikis and internal social network. It was initially designed as an information management tool for knowledge workers and is often used for collaborative research projects, market intelligence, information brokerage, etc.

Social navigation is a form of social computing introduced by Paul Dourish and Matthew Chalmers in 1994, who defined it as when "movement from one item to another is provoked as an artifact of the activity of another or a group of others". According to later research in 2002, "social navigation exploits the knowledge and experience of peer users of information resources" to guide users in the information space, and that it is becoming more difficult to navigate and search efficiently with all the digital information available from the World Wide Web and other sources. Studying others' navigational trails and understanding their behavior can help improve one's own search strategy by guiding them to make more informed decisions based on the actions of others.

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