Laura Stiles's List: LS534 Presentation Resources

• Because, while bookmarks allowed users to record sites of interest, they soon  grew to become unwieldy in terms of needing to be managed within the confines of  a simple, hierarchical structure. It became apparent with the growing power of  the new search engines that it was easier just to search for a particular site  afresh each time – in effect, search engines were now able to provide a dynamic  bookmarking service, or bookmarks on demand.

  • I had not thought of this before, but they are right--there comes a point when it is easier to search anew for a site rather than sift through folders.
• These would become the social link managers, with links not randomly discovered  or crawled by robots and spiders, but registered, tagged and rated by users for  their own benefit, and made available to other users [n9].  Robot wisdom was increasingly being challenged by the 'buzz latency' [11] that such a shared personal recommendation system creates.

  • Yet another point I had not thought of--rather than use a search engine to find links/sites, why not use other people's widom? Someone had commented that to do research, just use a search engine--but this statement challenges that idea.
• Tim O'Reilly has talked about an 'architecture of participation' [12] whereby a grassroots user base creates a self-regulating  collaborative network. The result of this approach is that the best applications  become more useful for all participants the more that people make use of them.

• Social bookmarking tools also share this characteristic: the more they are  used, the more value accrues to the system itself and thereby to all who  participate in it.
• This orderly approach to cataloguing allows for both the validation and quality  control of known terms to be registered within an information system. By  contrast, the new link managers tend to use dynamic categorization systems  whereby the user annotates links with whatever terms seem most relevant. Links  are generally annotated with 'tags', which are free-form labels assigned by the  user and not drawn from any controlled vocabulary. This is very much a  'bottom-up' (or personal) approach compared with the traditional 'top-down' (or  organizational) structured means of classification.
• Another approach that has been discussed (and, in the case of del.icio.us  even implemented as 'tag bundles') is the tagging of tags, which could result in  the creation of hierarchical folksonomies

  • I have done such bundling of tags--is it possible to create a bundle of bundles?
• Bear in mind also that the terms used are, by definition, the very terms that  real users might be expected to use in future when searching for this  information.
• an 'analogue' one in which items can exist in multiple categories, each  weighted by relative popularity.

  • I think this means that tags are not restricted to one category--but can occupy multiple positions at once. (Starfish principle).
• Search engines, at this point, tend to index and search a global space – not my  local space. My space comprises the documents I am interested in and the  documents of other users that I want to follow.

  • Another point of difference between search engines and social bookmarking/tags.
• Usernames are presented first, followed directly by any tag or tag combination.  If no username is presented then a '/tag' path element is prefixed  to the path to avoid name collisions of tags with possible usernames.

  • Oh yes--remember to check whether you can subscribe to an RSS feed for certain tags or combinations of tags.
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  • Personal user accounts (groups sometimes provided)  
  • Mechanism for entering links, titles and descriptions  
  • Browser bookmarklets to facilitate entry [n18]  
  • Classification by 'open' or 'free' tagging  
  • Search by tag or user (Boolean combinations sometimes allowed)  
  • Querying of links based on popularity, users, tags, etc.  
  • RSS feeds  
  • Extensions such as browser plug-ins

  • This could be a useful way of identifying social bookmarking services--see the list, and then go to a sample one and check out their information page.

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