Social bookmarking
Encyclopedia
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing
, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.
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 favour of or against its quality, or tag
s 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".
In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web page
s 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 feed
s 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.
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.
burst — Backflip closed citing "economic woes at the start of the 21st century". In 2005, the founder of Blink said, "I don't think it was that we were 'too early' or that we got killed when the bubble burst. I believe it all came down to product design, and to some very slight differences in approach."
Founded in 2003, Delicious (then called del.icio.us) pioneered tagging
Mathes, A., Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata. Computer Mediated Communication – LIS590CMC, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, December 2004. and coined the term social bookmarking. In 2004, as Delicious began to take off, Furl
and Simpy
were released, along with Citeulike
and Connotea
(sometimes called social citation services) and the related recommendation system Stumbleupon
. In 2006, Ma.gnolia
, Blue Dot (later renamed to Faves), 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.Think Research Featured Concept: Fetch! by members of the Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research
Sites such as Digg
, reddit
, and Newsvine
offer a similar system for organization of social news
.
). Collaborative tagging exhibits a form of complex system
s (or self-organizing
) dynamics. 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.. Once such stable distributions form, the correlation
s 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. 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 cheese).
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 of a resource. Also, people can find and bookmark web pages that have not yet been noticed or indexed by web spiders. 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-user
s than systems that rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it (although both types of ranking are vulnerable to fraud, and both need technical countermeasures to try to deal with this).
to make their website more visible. The more often a web page is submitted and tagged, the better chance it has of being found. Spam
mers have started bookmarking the same web page multiple times and/or tagging each page of their web site using a lot of popular tags, obliging developers to constantly adjust their security system to overcome abuses.
File sharing
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multimedia , documents, or electronic books. It may be implemented through a variety of ways...
, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.
Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata
Metadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
, 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 favour of or against its quality, or tag
Tag (metadata)
In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...
s that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy
Folksonomy
A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging...
. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content".
In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web page
Web page
A web page or webpage is a document or information resource that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser and displayed on a monitor or mobile device. This information is usually in HTML or XHTML format, and may provide navigation to other web pages via hypertext...
s 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
Tag (metadata)
In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...
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 feed
Web feed
A web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by an aggregator...
s 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.
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
Web annotation
A web annotation is an online annotation associated with a web resource, typically a web page. With a Web annotation system, a user can add, modify or remove information from a Web resource without modifying the resource itself...
, and groups or other social network
Social network
A social network is a social structure made up of individuals called "nodes", which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.Social...
features.
History
The concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList, the features of which included public and private bookmarks.Extras - itList and Other Bookmark Managers by LaJean Humphries, January 17, 2000 Within the next three years, online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies such as Backflip, Blink, Clip2, ClickMarks, HotLinks, and others entering the market."Livewire: Putting Your Bookmarks on the Web" by Michelle V. Rafter, December 8, 1999 (Reuters)"Net surfers can backtrack with Backflip", December 3, 1999, CNET News They provided folders for organizing bookmarks, and some services automatically sorted bookmarks into folders (with varying degrees of accuracy)."Web Services Offer Solutions to Bookmark Overload" by Julia Lawlor, July 13, 2000, New York Times Blink included browser buttons for saving bookmarks;"New Web Service Offers Portable Bookmark Lists" by Ian Austen, November 11, 1999, New York Times Backflip enabled users to email their bookmarks to others"Backflip Lets Web Users Store and Share Bookmarks" by Ian Austen, April 6, 2000, New York Times and displayed "Backflip this page" buttons on partner websites. Lacking viable revenue models, this early generation of social bookmarking companies failed as the dot-com bubbleDot-com bubble
The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...
burst — Backflip closed citing "economic woes at the start of the 21st century". In 2005, the founder of Blink said, "I don't think it was that we were 'too early' or that we got killed when the bubble burst. I believe it all came down to product design, and to some very slight differences in approach."
Founded in 2003, Delicious (then called del.icio.us) pioneered tagging
Tag (metadata)
In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...
Mathes, A., Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata. Computer Mediated Communication – LIS590CMC, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, December 2004. and coined the term social bookmarking. In 2004, as Delicious began to take off, Furl
Furl
Furl was a free social bookmarking website that allowed members to store searchable copies of webpages and share them with others. Every member received 5 gigabytes of storage space. The site was founded by Mike Giles in 2003 and purchased by LookSmart in 2004...
and Simpy
Simpy
Simpy was a web-based personal and social bookmarking service.The service launched in May 2004. In 2010, it was acquired by Reuters and ceased operation as a social bookmarking site in April of that year.- Service features :...
were released, along with Citeulike
CiteULike
CiteULike is based on the principle of social bookmarking and is aimed to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers. In the same way that it is possible to catalog web pages or photographs , scientists can share information on academic papers with specific...
and Connotea
Connotea
Connotea is a free online reference management service for scientists, researchers, and clinicians, created in December 2004 by Nature Publishing Group...
(sometimes called social citation services) and the related recommendation system Stumbleupon
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles.Toolbar versions exist for...
. In 2006, Ma.gnolia
Ma.gnolia
Gnolia, named Ma.gnolia until 2009, was a social bookmarking web site with an emphasis on design, social features, and open standards. It is now perhaps most notable for losing members' bookmarks in a widely-reported data loss incident in January 2009...
, Blue Dot (later renamed to Faves), and Diigo
Diigo
Diigo is a social bookmarking website which allows signed-up users to bookmark and tag web-pages. Additionally, it allows users to highlight any part of a webpage and attach sticky notes to specific highlights or to a whole page. These annotations can be kept private, shared with a group within...
entered the bookmarking field, and Connectbeam
Connectbeam
Connectbeam was a company based in Mountain View, California that provided enterprise social software. The company provided two core services: social bookmarking and aggregation of links and metadata for content from other social software applications...
included a social bookmarking and tagging service aimed at businesses and enterprises. In 2007, IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
released its Lotus Connections
IBM Lotus Connections
IBM Connections is a proprietary Web 2.0 social software application developed by the Lotus Software division of IBM. The goal of Lotus Connections is to empower companies to be more innovative and help them execute more quickly by using dynamic networks of co-workers, partners and customers...
product.Think Research Featured Concept: Fetch! by members of the Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research
Sites such as Digg
Digg
Digg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems...
Reddit
reddit is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text "self" post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down," which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page.Reddit was originally...
, and Newsvine
Newsvine
Newsvine is a community-powered, collaborative journalism news website, owned by msnbc.com, which draws content from its users and syndicated content from mainstream sources such as The Associated Press...
offer a similar system for organization of social news
Social news
A social news website is a type of website that features user-submitted stories that are ranked based on popularity.-Slashdot:Slashdot, started in 1997, was one of the first social news websites. It focuses mainly on science and technology related news. Users can submit stories, and the editors...
.
Folksonomy
A simple form of shared vocabularies does emerge in social bookmarking systems (folksonomyFolksonomy
A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging...
). Collaborative tagging exhibits a form of complex system
Complex system
A complex system is a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties not obvious from the properties of the individual parts....
s (or self-organizing
Self-organization
Self-organization is the process where a structure or pattern appears in a system without a central authority or external element imposing it through planning...
) dynamics. 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
Power law
A power law is a special kind of mathematical relationship between two quantities. When the frequency of an event varies as a power of some attribute of that event , the frequency is said to follow a power law. For instance, the number of cities having a certain population size is found to vary...
distributions.. Once such stable distributions form, the correlation
Correlation
In statistics, dependence refers to any statistical relationship between two random variables or two sets of data. Correlation refers to any of a broad class of statistical relationships involving dependence....
s 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. 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
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community through an open call....
.
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
Folksonomy
A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging...
instead of a controlled vocabulary
Controlled vocabulary
Controlled vocabularies provide a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. They are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri, taxonomies and other form of knowledge organization systems...
), 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
Synonym
Synonyms are different words with almost identical or similar meanings. Words that are synonyms are said to be synonymous, and the state of being a synonym is called synonymy. The word comes from Ancient Greek syn and onoma . The words car and automobile are synonyms...
/antonym
Antonym
In lexical semantics, opposites are words that lie in an inherently incompatible binary relationship as in the opposite pairs male : female, long : short, up : down, and precede : follow. The notion of incompatibility here refers to the fact that one word in an opposite pair entails that it is not...
confusion, unorthodox and personalized tag schemata from some users, and no mechanism for users to indicate hierarchical
Hierarchy
A hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another...
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 cheese).
Uses
For 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. Libraries have found social bookmarking to be useful as an easy way to provide lists of informative links to patrons.Comparison with search engines
With regard to creating a high-quality search engine, a social bookmarking system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engineSearch engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
spiders
Web crawler
A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters.This process is called Web...
. 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 of a resource. Also, people can find and bookmark web pages that have not yet been noticed or indexed by web spiders. 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
Metric (mathematics)
In mathematics, a metric or distance function is a function which defines a distance between elements of a set. A set with a metric is called a metric space. A metric induces a topology on a set but not all topologies can be generated by a metric...
for end-user
End-user
Economics and commerce define an end user as the person who uses a product. The end user or consumer may differ from the person who purchases the product...
s than systems that rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it (although both types of ranking are vulnerable to fraud, and both need technical countermeasures to try to deal with this).
Abuse
Social bookmarking can also be susceptible to corruption and collusion. Due to its popularity, some people have started considering it as a tool to use along with search engine optimizationSearch engine optimization
Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid search results...
to make their website more visible. The more often a web page is submitted and tagged, the better chance it has of being found. Spam
Spam (electronic)
Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately...
mers have started bookmarking the same web page multiple times and/or tagging each page of their web site using a lot of popular tags, obliging developers to constantly adjust their security system to overcome abuses.
See also
- List of social bookmarking websites
- AddThisAddThisAddThis is a widely used social bookmarking service founded by Dom Vonarburg and owned by Clearspring that can be integrated into a website with the use of a web widget. Once added, visitors to the website can bookmark an item using a variety of services, such as Facebook, MySpace, Google...
- ShareThisShareThisThe ShareThis button is an all-in-one widget that lets people share any content on the Web with friends via e-mail, AIM, or text message. The widget can also keep an account of personal contacts so that users can send an e-mail, IM, or text message with favorite links to friends...
- Bookmark manager
- Models of collaborative taggingModels of collaborative taggingMany have argued that social tagging or collaborative tagging systems can provide navigational cues or “way-finders” for other users to explore information. The notion is that, given that social tags are labels that users create to represent topics extracted from Web documents, interpretation of...
- Social bookmark link generatorSocial bookmark link generatorA Social bookmark link generator is a third party software which generates a code that can be added to Web pages and/or Blogs to facilitate bookmarking the web content on bookmarking websites....
- Social network serviceSocial network serviceA social networking service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, who, for example, share interests and/or activities. A social network service consists of a representation of each user , his/her social...
- Social softwareSocial softwareSocial software applications include communication tools and interactive tools. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a...
- Semantic WebSemantic WebThe Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...