Social+Bookmarking

toc =What is Social Bookmarking?= Social bookmarking is the idea of saving bookmarks to a public web site and allotting them “tags” with keywords. It is different from traditional bookmarking in that bookmarking is the practice of saving the URL of a website on a computer, which one wishes to visit in the future. Registering with a social bookmarking site enables one to create a collection of bookmarks, add tags of choice, and assign individual bookmarks as public or private. When bookmarks are inactive or not being used, many sites notify the users that the URLs no longer operational. Searches to social bookmarking sites can be conducted by typing keywords, persons, or popular topics and view public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes, which users have created and saved.

Brief History Of Social Bookmarking.
The primitive social bookmarking sites date back a few years ago, and began with the operation of such sites as Simpy, del.icio.us, and Furl. An open source version of del.icio.us is de.lirio.us, and citeulike is a social bookmarking site for academic papers. Social bookmarking is very useful when accumulating resources, which are to be used by others. Anybody can participate in social bookmarking.

How Social Bookmarking Works.
Social bookmarking innovates new ways of organizing information and categorizing resources. Once a person creates a bookmark and assigns tags to every resource, a user-directed means of classifying information. Social bookmarking websites indicate who created the bookmark and provide access to other bookmarked resources created by the user. This way, users can socially interact with others interested in the same topics. Users also have the ability to see how many people have used a tag and search for all resources that have assigned with the same tag. Over time, this allows the community of users to develop a collection or structure of keywords to define resources, also known as folksonomy.

Why Social Bookmarking Is Significant.
Social bookmarking provides users with an opportunity to convey contrary views on information and resources through informal organizational structures. This allows persons with the same interests to communicate with one another and create new communes of users that induce the evolutions of folksonomies and common tags for users. Folksonomy based tools for research enables an individual to take advantage of the insights of others to find information on the topic of interest, even information broadly related to the topic. These kinds of tools attract users back again and again because the folksonomy and the collection of resources are always changing.

The Downsides of Social Bookmarking.
By characterization, social bookmarking is done by amateurs. There is no regulated system as to how resources are organized and tagged. Thus, tags can be inconsistent or poorly used. Social bookmarking reflects the values of the community of users, there lies a risk of presenting a biased view of the value of any particular topic. Lastly, social bookmarking means storing data in another location, which needs to be updated and maintained.

The Future of Social Bookmarking.
Social bookmarking is not a complicated technology and thus the threshold to participate is low both for the websites and the users. The principals behind social bookmarking are working their way into other applications; tagging is being bridged to other types of resources, such as email. Thus, the way in which user communities are created and how they function may have important ramifications. As the architecture of online resources changes and new systems of classification emerge and mature establish, the actual design and function of databases may be changed to contain new ways of managing information.

References:
www.educause.edu/eli/ http://del.icio.us/ http://www.simpy.com/ http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/lund/04lund.html http://www.citeulike.org/ http://www.furl.net/ www.classroomhelp.com/workshop/**Furl**