Social What? Social Bookmarking! Liane Haslauer Greater Manchester Professional Development Center

What is social bookmarking? From Wikipedia: “A method for internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources.” Bookmarks can be saved publicly or privately Bookmarks can be backed up

Metadata Descriptions can be added bookmarks in the form of metadatametadata ◦ text comments ◦ votes in favor of or against ◦ tags (keywords) ◦ When many users add tags or comments these tags become a “folksonomy” (folk + taxonomy)

Advantages Tags are created by human beings who understand the content in context (not software which attempts to make meaning algorithmically) People can find pages that haven’t been indexed by search engines yet Pages ranked according to how many times it is bookmarked by users (not how many external links point to it) and…

My number one reason… You can access all of your bookmarks from any computer from anywhere.

Disadvantages No standard set of keywords Mistagging (spelling errors) Inconsistencies ◦ Singular vs. plural ◦ Capitalization Unclear tags ◦ Personalized schemata Skewed perspective ◦ Overrepresentation of those applying tags

Social Bookmarking Tools Three things with: Delicious Do more with: Diigo Think inside the box: Simply Box