Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a collaborative application that relies on user-created input.

Del.icio.us was one of the first social bookmarking Web sites.

Instead of saving bookmarks on your PC, you save them on the del.icio.us server. That means you can access them from any device that is connected to the Internet and you can share them with others.

In addition to saving a bookmark, you can optionally add comments and tags. You can use the comments any way you like, perhaps to remind you why you saved the bookmark and to give your impression of the Web site it links to. Tags allow you to group related bookmarks, creating your own classification scheme. They also allow others to find bookmarks you tag. For example, I can share an up to date list of Web pages dealing with Wikipedia evaluation, because I have added the tag wikieval to each of them.

Note that in this and similar systems, the users, not the system designer, controls categorization. This is in contrast with a pre-determined taxonomy like the Dewey Decimal system used in libraries or the system biologists use to classify animals, plants, fungi, etc. into species, families, orders, etc. Tagging systems are sometimes referred to folksonomies.

You can create a special tag for a small group, for instance we could tag bookmarks relevant to this class "cis471". You could then find anything posted with respect to our class by retrieving bookmarks with the "cis471" tag or you can find other people's bookmarks using more generic tags like "wine" or "SQL".

Note that when you retrieve a bookmark, you see how many people have also saved it. That can be taken as an indication of the popularity and value of the bookmarked site. This sort of group assessment or wisdom of the crowd is common on the Web.

Once you install del.idio.us link buttons on your browser, it takes very little time and effort to save a bookmark on the del.icio.us server. If the payoff is not worth the effort, a user will not contribute content to a service. (Of course, there are many rewards for contributing to a common goal).

Finally, note that the tags and comments we add to bookmarks are examples of metadata, data about the data we are saving.

Here is a short video on social bookmarking.

Here is a comparison of social bookmarking services.

Here are mashups created using the Del.icio.us API. This is the Del.icio.us "ecosystem."

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