Week 4: Social Bookmarking (July 14-20)

Welcome to week 4 of Web 2.0: Introduction to Second Generation Web Tools.

This week we’ll be talking about social bookmarking.

The Web contains a vast and daily expanding amount of information. How is it possible to find what you are looking for online? What’s worse, once you’ve found what you want, how do you remember where and what it is? Social bookmarking tools can help you find and manage your favorite information on the Web.

Why are social bookmarking tools better than conventional browser-based bookmarking? Using traditional bookmarking tools like Internet Explorer’s favorites, your bookmarks are stuck on one computer. Secondly, though web browser bookmarks can be organized into folders, if you have a lot of bookmarks, organization is difficult and time-consuming.

Instead of using folders, social bookmarking tools use tagging to help you organize and find your bookmarks. Tagging is an open and informal method of categorizing that allows users to associate keywords with online content (webpages, pictures & posts). Tagging is unstructured and free-form, allowing users to create connections between data any way they want.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking tool that allows you to bookmark a web page and add tags to categorize your bookmarks. Many users find that the real power of del.icio.us is in the social networking aspect – you can see how other people have tagged similar links and also discover other websites that may be of interest to you. You can think of it as peering into another person’s filing cabinet, but with this powerful bookmarking tool, each person’s filing cabinet leads you to more cabinets.

Some social bookmarking tools are geared towards scientists and researchers. They specialize in bookmarking journal articles and other online resources, capturing full citation information for articles instead of just a link, and are often called social reference managers. Examples of social reference managers are CiteULike and Nature Publishing Group’s Connotea.

View the 4 minute video tutorial below to get a good overview of del.icio.us.

Tagging is a quick and easy way for people to remember and re-find information. In del.icio.us, for example, users not only can tag their bookmarks with their own terms, they can also see who else tagged it and what tags other people used. This collective tagging information, the folksonomy, is a very powerful tool for finding information and like-minded communities.

But what exactly is a folksonomy? Folksonomy is a term first introduced by Thomas Vander Wal, who described folksonomy (a combination of the words “folk” and “taxonomy”) as the result of individuals tagging information objects for their own retrieval in a social setting such as del.icio.us or LibraryThing. People tag objects in a way that makes sense to them personally. As multiple people tag the same objects, a spontaneous and organic language for describing those objects arises—the folksonomy.

Folksonomies generally have either been hailed as the answer to the problems of formal classification or derided for the problems inherent in using free, unfettered, individually determined tagging as a classification or categorization method. A growing group of more neutral folksonomy thinkers see a place for both formal, hierarchical taxonomies and folksonomies. Folksonomies increase the number of entry points for resources, allow for implicit recommendations, and create community; taxonomies alleviate subject searching problems by employing authority control, precise searching, and high recall. Librarians are already playing with combining these two seemingly opposing styles.

OPTIONAL Discovery Readings: Reviews of the Tools

• Social bookmarking services and tools: the wisdom of crowds that organizes the web (Robin Good)
• CiteULike: a researcher’s social bookmarking service (Emamy & Cameron, in Ariadne)
• Social bookmarking (II): a case study – Connotea (Lund et al, D-Lib Magazine)

OPTIONAL Discovery Readings: Social Bookmarking in Medicine

• Social bookmarking & del.icio.us: a personal and professional productivity tool (Patricia Anderson)
• Tagging for health information organization and retrieval (Margaret Kipp)

Discovery Exercise 1:

Take a look around del.icio.us. Look at these health, hospital and science related sites:

• St. John’s Health System Medical Library – health care site
• Toolsmed – general medical collection
• gnoble – miscellaneous user who has marked a lot of science sites
• SJLibraryLearning2 – created for the San Jose Public Library’s Learning 2.0 program and contains a lot of links on Web2.0 technologies

Discovery Exercise 2:

Explore the site by clicking on tags and usernames. Try finding a bookmark that has also been bookmarked by a lot of other users–click on the “saved by” link. Can you see the comments they added about this bookmark or the tags that they used to categorize this reference?

Discovery Exercise 3:

Create your own del.icio.us account and bookmark National Jewish. Bookmark at least 5 more items. Has anyone else bookmarked the same things? (suggestion: bookmark one page from your Wetpaint wiki to your del.icio.us account)

Discovery Exercise 4:

Create a blog post about your experience and thoughts about this tool. Can you see the potential of this tool for research assistance, collaborative nursing resource collections, hospital administration? Or just as an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere?

Remember to track your progress!

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Tags: bookmarks, folksonomy, social_bookmarking, social_bookmarks, tags