Do you find that the list of Bookmarks or favourites on your browser of choice have grown like topsy such that it is almost impossible to find the URL’s you want when you want them? Have you ever had to work on someone else’s computer and wished to find an internet site but you can’t remember the URL because it is stored in your Favourites or Bookmarks on the computer you normally use? Would you like a more efficient way of categorising these URL’s? Would you like to have a SEARCH function that allows you to sort through all these sites to find just the one that you require? Would you like an alternative to using Google or other traditional search engines to locate websites of possible interest? Do you wonder how many other internet sites are out there that are just like the ones that you are using? Would you like to be able to view other people’s favourites to see what they are using or would you like to easily share the fruits of your browsing with others? If you have answered yes to any or all of these, then social bookmarking is just the tool for you.

So What Is Social Bookmarking?

Put simply social bookmarking is putting your favourite internet sites into an online repository site. The genesis of social bookmarking was way back in 1996 though the format of the social bookmarking interface has gone through a number of iterations since that time. Initially the sites that have gone on to become social bookmarking sites were far more single person focussed than the socially focussed arrangements we know today. Back then a number of internet startups were working on developing spaces where information about these favourite sites could be shared. Unfortunately the dotcom problems of the late 90’s caused most of these initiatives to founder and it wasn’t until around 2003 that two of the most prominent social bookmarking sites began to make their mark. As with most things Web 2.0 though social bookmarking is much more than just storing your sites online.

Social bookmarking services allow users to save details of there favourite internet sites to an online repository site that can be accessed anywhere via an internet browser. This contrasts with saving the same sites to an internet browser. In this case access to the records of the sites is available to the user of that computer only when they are working on the computer on which the sites have been saved. For students especially who often move between school and home computers this capability could be very advantageous however in a way this is the most minor advantage of using a social bookmarking site.

More importantly social bookmarking services enable users to “tag” their entries according to categories that the user can determine themselves when they save there bookmarks on the social bookmark site. This contrasts to traditional browser bookmarking setup which in the case of Firefox does allow the user to assign Keyword and Descriptions to the entries as well as organise them into folders. Internet Explorer however is less user friendly in that it only allows the user to organise Favourites into folders.

Let’s face it though even if we are an organised person most of us never quite get around to use even this base level organization of our bookmarks. How many of you can really say that your bookmarks are in folders that you can access readily? Most of your lists will look something like mine, a real dog’s breakfast.

Explorer favorites image here

John Pearce’s Internet Explorer Favourites

Captured (26^th August 2007)

So What Are These Tags?

The use of tags to categorize social bookmark entries is a major development derived from and associated very much with Web 2.0. Before the advent of Web 2.0, traditional categorization of items such as bookmarks and the like would be done according to a predetermined set of categories derived by a group of experts in that particular area. These set of rules are known as a taxonomy. For teachers the most familiar of these taxonomic arrangements would be the Dewey system used for cataloguing books. Social bookmarking by contrast derives from a more egalitarian and open ended arrangement and as a result the means by which entries are categorized is far more fluid. Unlike the top down model of the taxonomy, in this case the categories by which things are organised are being determined and moulded by the users. This open ended, bottom up organizational structure where the derivation and modification of the categories are determined by the users is known as a folksonomy.

The key to the social bookmarking folksonomy are what is known as tags. These tags are the means by which the user of the bookmarking site chooses to use to categorize the entries that are contained within the site. The advantage of using tags is that each entry in the repository can have more than one tag assigned to it. Using this system an entry from NASA on the solar system may be tagged in a number of ways. The most obvious tag to assign to this site would be “Space” and other tags could include, dependent on what the sites contains, “Sun”, “Moon, “Planets” etc. If the site is suitable for students of a particular age it might be tagged according to the year level it is best suited for eg “K-6”. If it contains animations or worksheets or any other special feature these too could be the basis for a tag. Ultimately the choice for the number and definition of the tags lies with the user. The only limitation on tags is that they must not contain spaces so in our example above if you wanted to include all of the planetary arrangement as a tag it could be tagged as “solarsystem”, “solar_system”, or “solar-system”.

This use of multiple categories contrasts to how a book covering the same subject matter might be categorized under the Dewey system taxonomy. Here the book would reside in the 520’s shelf area.

Over time as more content is added to the folksonomy these tags undergo a process of refinement; the more popular ones gain greater currency and the lesser ones tend to fall away though rarely disappear altogether. Folksonomies are eminently suited to the Web 2.0 environment where development and change are a constant. Because a folksonomy is far more accepting of this change the use of tags has spread well beyond the world of social bookmarking into other areas including blogging and image repositories such as flickr and the like. On many sites you may now see a “Tag Cloud”. This is the visual representation of the tags or categories in use on that site. When you look at the list you will notice that some words are larger in size than others. This is because there are more entries in the blog or repository associated with that particular tag than there are for tags that are smaller in size.

Tag Cloud Image here

The del.icio.us Sample Tag Cloud

http://del.icio.us/tag/

Captured 26^th August 2007

Working with tags has a range of other advantages some of which might also been seen as a deficiency. Tags enable multiple perspectives to be expressed about essentially the same content. This means that different groups or communities might tag the same image or website under a number of different categories. Our NASA site may be tagged “teaching_resource”, “space”, “worksheets” by a teacher but the same site may be tagged with “Neil Armstrong”, “moon”, “Apollo11” by a student interested in doing a project on the moon landing. Whilst they cater for quite a lot of individuality the reverse of this is the problem that some tags are context bound and are often esoteric. In some extreme cases tags can become pejorative.

Over time tags help to define important information through the persistency of their use. Tags which are not useful generally don’t attract other adherents and tend to fade into obscurity. Having said this, one of the great benefits of folksonomy is that there are no wrong tags only better ones.

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