Mark Marino's Network

We are here going to remind you of hyperlinks in all their glory, sell you on the idea of bookmarking hyperlinks, point you at other folks who are doing the same, and tell you why this is a good thing. Just as long as those hyperlinks (or let's call them plain old links) are managed, tagged, commented upon, and published onto the Web, they represent a user's own personal library placed on public record, which – when aggregated with other personal libraries – allows for rich, social networking opportunities. Why spill any ink (digital or not) in rewriting what someone else has already written about instead of just pointing at the original story and adding the merest of titles, descriptions and tags for future reference? More importantly, why not make these personal 'link playlists' available to oneself and to others from whatever browser or computer one happens to be using at the time?

This paper reviews some current initiatives, as of early 2005, in providing public link management applications on the Web – utilities that are often referred to under the general moniker of 'social bookmarking tools'. There are a couple of things going on here: 1) server-side software aimed specifically at managing links with, crucially, a strong, social networking flavour, and 2) an unabashedly open and unstructured approach to tagging, or user classification, of those links.
Matt Biddulph in an XML.com article last year [2], in which he reviews one of the better known social bookmarking tools, del.icio.us [3], declares that the "del.icio.us-space has three major axes: users, tags, and URLs". We fully support that assessment but choose to present this deconstruction in a reverse order. This paper thus first recaps a brief history of bookmarks, then discusses the current interest in tagging, moves on to look at certain social issues, and finally considers some of the feature sets offered by the new bookmarking tools. A general review of a number of common social bookmarking tools is presented in the annex.
8 more annotations...
- Where do links begin? Links are as old as the Web itself [n2]. Indeed, links are the stuff of the Web [n3]. But the idea of organizing and managing links systematically rather than just listing them on a given web page seems to have emerged with the earliest graphical browsers, and, in particular, with the foremost browser of its time, Mosaic [n4], the granddaddy of all modern browsers.
- This unstructured (or better, free structured) approach to classification with users assigning their own labels is variously referred to as a 'folksonomy' [n10], 'folk classification', 'ethnoclassification' [n11], 'distributed classification', or 'social classification'. Other terms that arise are 'open tagging', 'free tagging', and 'faceted hierarchy'. Following Adam Mathes in his paper 'Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata' [21] we would generally incline to the term 'social classification', or even 'distributed classification', as this, to our minds, most closely describes the nature of the activity, although we must concede that the word 'folksonomy' has gained considerable currency and there is little getting away from it.
- Compared to the traditional top-down approach, folksonomy data is much noisier but also more flexible, more abundant and far cheaper. 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
- The Social Axis
  
  The third axis of Matt Biddulph's deconstruction (which was mentioned in the Introduction of this paper) is the user axis and how users can (and do) make use of these tools, which has both a local dimension and a global dimension. As Liz Lawley has blogged on Many 2 Many [31]:
  
  "Flickr and del.icio.us work so well for me not because they aggregate the world's tags, but because they allow me to aggregate my social network's tags, links, and photos. [...] I don't want to see "research" resources from a molecular biologist, but I do want to see them from a sociologist studying online social networks."
  
  This ability to sort out the wheat from the chaff is an important win over a web-based search engine. 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.
- A further issue to consider is tag spamming. E-mail has been severely impacted by spamming. Blog comments and trackbacks are similarly vulnerable to attack. Adware and spyware are already corrupting users' browsing experiences. There is no question but that spamming of these new social tools can and will occur – it almost goes with the territory that social forums will foster such 'parasites' and some instances have been noted already. So far, however, it does not seem to have been a major problem, largely because spam has been drowned out by legitimate use.
- A further issue to consider is tag spamming. E-mail has been severely impacted by spamming. Blog comments and trackbacks are similarly vulnerable to attack. Adware and spyware are already corrupting users' browsing experiences. There is no question but that spamming of these new social tools can and will occur – it almost goes with the territory that social forums will foster such 'parasites' and some instances have been noted already. So far, however, it does not seem to have been a major problem, largely because spam has been drowned out by legitimate use. But obviously, continuing vigilance must play a part, and robust defences may need to be put in place should this start to become problematic.
- As a simple demonstration of the way in which social bookmarking tools might benefit academic research, we show here how Connotea can be used by readers of this paper, and of its companion [4], to access the reference lists, to share other relevant links, and to trade comments on them and on the papers themselves.
- Here we choose to focus on a small number of social bookmarking tools that either have a strong public following (such as del.icio.us [3] and Flickr [25]), are known within the library community (such as Furl [48]) or have an academic focus (such as CiteULike [49], Connotea [6] and unalog [50]). We also add Frassle [51], Simpy [52] and Spurl.net [53] because these tools, while competing within the same space as the aforementioned, are also thriving examples. Figure 6 shows a lay-of-the-land overview of both the reviewed tools and some of the others with regard to a general or scholarly disposition, as well as with regard to whether links or web pages are being hosted.

Torsten Rox on 2006-03-31

This paper reviews some current initiatives, as of early 2005, in providing public link management applications on the Web - utilities that are often referred to under the general moniker of 'social bookmarking tools'.

Andrey Subbota on 2006-04-26

Spurl.net

hiroshi on 2006-07-05

This paper reviews some current initiatives, as of early 2005, in providing public link management applications on the Web â utilities that are often referred to under the general moniker of 'social bookmarking tools'. There are a couple of things go

- svartling on 2006-07-24

This paper reviews some current initiatives, as of early 2005, in providing public link management applications on the Web â utilities that are often referred to under the general moniker of 'social bookmarking tools'. There are a couple of things go

NSC on 2006-07-27

Issues

1) server-side software aimed specifically at managing links with, crucially, a strong, social networking flavour, and
2) an unabashedly open and unstructured approach to tagging, or user classification, of those links.

Gary Burge on 2006-08-02

Just as long as those hyperlinks (or let's call them plain old links) are managed, tagged, commented upon, and published onto the Web, they represent a user's own personal library placed on public record, which – when aggregated with other personal libr

ken love on 2006-08-03

This paper reviews some current initiatives, as of early 2005, in providing public link management applications on the Web â utilities that are often referred to under the general moniker of 'social bookmarking tools'. There are a couple of things go

Duncan Weddell on 2006-08-04

good info on social bookmarking

Matt McAlister on 2006-08-04

This paper reviews some current initiatives, as of early 2005, in providing public link management applications on the Web – utilities that are often referred to under the general moniker of 'social bookmarking tools'.

Lambert Heller on 2006-08-05

Eingehender Vergleich der BM-Tools, Fokus auf akademsichen Nutzern.

Lambert Heller on 2006-08-08

Eingehender Vergleich der BM-Tools, Fokus auf akademsichen Nutzern.

rawwell on 2006-08-17

This paper reviews some current initiatives, as of early 2005, in providing public link management applications on the Web â utilities that are often referred to under the general moniker of 'social bookmarking tools'. There are a couple of things go

Jesse Kim on 2006-10-20

click link to see the full text

13 more comments...

mistercharlie on 2006-10-25

Review and overview of social bookmarking services and tools

Kurt Mathiesen on 2007-02-07

From Dlib-Mag

Drivers, Tweeters Deputized as Mobile Meteorologists : Discovery News

"The National Weather Service (NWS) wants you, your car and your cell phone. Specifically, NWS wants weather data from all three of those sources.

A brand new program using Twitter to gather weather information has just been launched. At the same time, meteorologists are testing out a system to turn cars into roving weather stations, so drivers everywhere will know exactly what the road ahead has in store."

Shared by Howard Rheingold, like and 2 saves total