Technology Trend: Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is emerging as a way to find reliable information on the Internet, to track changing information for oneself and to recommend good sites to others.

Social bookmarking sites offer the “wisdom of the crowds”. They reveal which sites are cited by others the most often. Unlike wikis, social bookmarking site users are able to search for information based on who has recommended them – an implied endorsement by a reliable source – or by freshness or popularity.

These sites can also be used as a sort of personal clippings file. It is different from a browser’s bookmarks or favorites folder in that it is searchable by a user’s own tags, and thus more a reflection of one’s own memory.

Tags can be thought of as search words in reverse – a filing system in which each file can be found in a number of ways, all of which make sense to you, the user. For example, you may have tagged an article about a community youth development project in Ypsilanti, Michigan using the words “Michigan”, “CYD” and “urban”. Later on, this article will turn up whenever you click on any of these search words. The article is “filed” in more than one place.

The need for a human search filter is obvious – there are billions of websites now, a universe with no central directory. Until Google emerged as the search engine of choice, there was no easy way to search the entire Web for information unless you knew its location, or unless the Web site was listed in a human-compiled directory such as yahoo. This excluded many new sites and pages that had not yet been catalogued.

Google’s technology made it possible to search for any site by search word, but the results are ranked by an algorithm of the number of hits and links a site has. A high Google ranking does not assure the reliability of the information, or that the point of view is the one you want. For example, if you were a child psychologist interested in finding research about teenage girls, you would have to wade through many non-scholarly sites with differing points of view – the teens themselves, parents and some porn sites. Google Scholar gets closer, but focuses on journals, which will not contain the newest information or anything outside of peer-reviewed publications.

Social bookmarking sites are Web-based rather than housed on a single computer, so they are accessible anywhere. The latest and most popular bookmarks added often appear on the site’s general home page, although once you sign in, your personalized home page will appear. Like social networking sites, the various social bookmarking sites have different audiences and slightly different functions.

delicious.com and ma.gnolia.com
One of the most popular social bookmarking sites. Delicious (formerly located at www.del.icio.us) contains about 115 million bookmarks, all contributed and tagged by users. delicious.com coined the term "social bookmarking" and pioneered tagging. Tags are one-word labels for sites, such as “youth development” or “gender issues.”  

Delicious, ma.gnolia and other social bookmarking sites ask you to install a button on your web browser’s search bar that allows you to tag pages using words that make sense to you. Later on, you can search for visited pages using these tags.

To maximize the use of social bookmarking sites, users can access the bookmarks of other users with similar points of view. Their bookmarks are often valuable resources because a bookmark is similar to an endorsement. So in the example above, you could access the bookmarks of child psychologists you know personally or by reputation and look at their bookmarks for information about teenage girls. Bookmarking is similar to social networking, but so far does not have biography pages attached to them. So in order to seek out someone’s bookmarks, you must know their username or get to know them by their choices.

digg.com and reddit.com
More hip and youthful than delicious, digg functions a bit like a popularity contest. One computer science research group (see Heymann, et. al below) has called digg and reddit “social news sites” rather than social bookmarking, which they deem a bit more serious.

stumbleupon.com and friendfeed.com
Like Amazon.com, they “learn” a user’s likes and dislikes, and suggest similar sites that the user might find useful.

These sites are classified as social because users can elect to make their bookmarks public, although their real names may be kept confidential. So if you perform a search for bookmarks associated with the words “youth development” and “technology” and click on a user name, you’ll see all the public bookmarks for that user. If you consider that user’s bookmarks to be useful, you might elect to “follow” that user, piggybacking on their discoveries. Each site has a different approach to social bookmarking, and some, such as friendfeed, have so many features that they seem a lot like that other Web 2.0 technology, social networking.

And then come the super-aggregators — NewzNozzl, Mixx, Propeller, Newsvine and Addictomatic surf the headlines of many social bookmarking sites and aggregate them into one feed. BuzzTracker follows more than 100,000 different news sources, including daily newspapers such as the Washington Post. They make it possible to get an overview of what's going on across the Web.

Limitations

A research paper presented in early 2008 (see Heyman, et. al. below) finds that although user tags are generally objective and relevant, social bookmarking has not yet come close to replacing search engines. Tag words are usually part of the page title or text anyway, and even 100 million tagged sites is still a minority of the billions of pages in existence. But the authors speculate that if social bookmarking continues to grow in popularity, it may one day include all or most Web pages, making it just as useful.

You may wish to consult:

Heymann, P, Koutrika, G, and Garcia-Molina, H, “Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?” presented at the first International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, February 11-12, 2008, Palo Alto, CA, USA retrieved 17 October 2008.

Wikipedia’s list of social bookmarking sites

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