Social Bookmarking Tool

[Elisabetta Buendia]

Social bookmarking websites are sites on which Internet users share their web pages, articles, blog posts, images, and videos. There are a number of advantages to submitting your content to one (or more) of these sites. For one thing, they help to increase your brand awareness.

Pocket is a really nicely designed social bookmarking site. It comes with an app to Pocket stuff as you go, saving you returning to the site all the time. You can also search by interest to find interesting things.

Digg has changed a lot over the years. Previously it was more like Reddit where the front page was curated through the users of the site. Now this is done by editors, but it retains its bookmarking function.

Slashdot runs user-submitted news stories (with appropriate links) on Linux, computer hardware, devices, games, cloud, mobile, storage, security, management, book reviews, and more. See submission guidelines for details.

Links in social bookmarking sites are the starting point for discussion and knowledge-sharing. This makes social sites an excellent location for finding social media inspiration, earning backlinks and networking with potential influencers.

With social bookmarking, companies and social media marketing managers can find and save valuable content to add to their publishing schedule. This is an excellent way to simplify content curation and speed up social media growth. Most social bookmarking sites will also allow companies and business leaders to see which topics are most popular, most recent or attached to a specific issue.

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.

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]

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[21] with a related system for sharing and ranking social news, followed by competitors Reddit in 2005[22] and Newsvine in 2006.[23] 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.

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.[24] 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.[24] 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.[25] 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).

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.[26][27]

Libraries have found social bookmarking to be useful as an easy way to provide lists of informative links to patrons.[28] The University of Pennsylvania (UP) was one of the first library adopters with its PennTags.[29][30]

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.[31] For example, Delicious could be used in a course to provide an inexpensive answer to the question of rising course materials costs.[32] RISAL (Repository of Intean organization's users to manage and share bookmarks on the web and supporting teaching and learning at the university level.[33]

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.[34]

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[35] allows bookmarking of both in one step,[36] 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.[37]

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.[38] 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.

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