Social bookmarking sites
From HLWIKI Canada
 To browse other articles on a range of HSL topics, see the wiki index.
IntroductionSee also Citation management, Diigo and web 2.0 Social bookmarking (also social tagging) is a popular way to locate, catalogue and classify websites by assigning words, names and tags to group and describe those sites. Some popular, distinct social bookmarking sites are delicious, Diigo and Evernote. Strictly speaking, social bookmarking sites enable the use of one-word descriptors to tag websites, group and organize them. Social tags are essentially keywords chosen by users in order to describe web content. It's common to attach as many tags to bookmarks as needed, and even renaming or deleting them later. Bookmarks are easier and more flexible to use than fitting information into preconceived categories, folders and hierarchies. In a similar fashion, a folksonomy is a collaboratively-generated, open-ended system of applying natural language tags to categorize content. In contrast to taxonomies, authors of labels are usually their main users. Labels are also called tags, and the labeling process is called tagging. Folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easier to discover, navigate and search. A well-developed folksonomy is accessible as a shared vocabulary familiar to its main users. Two widely-cited examples of sites using tagging are Furl and Flickr (some librarians do not see Flickr as a good example of tagging). Connotea for health usersOne of the more popular scientific tagging systems to emerge recently is Connotea. Used increasingly by health librarians, researchers and scientists, it is a good match for clinicians, and researchers in medicine. Created in 2004 as a free reference management service, Connotea is provided by Nature Publishing and considered a kind of new breed of social bookmarking tools. Connotea is similar to CiteULike for academic papers and del.icio.us where users save links to websites; it boasts numerous features that take it beyond what other tools provide. (See Lund et al) For example, it allows exporting of references to citation manager programs, such as Endnote, Reference Manager or JabRef. This means it is possible to save references when working on a computer without bibliographic software installed and importing them for later citing in a completely open fashion similar to del.icio.us. HistoryTagging dates back to 1996 with the launch of itList.com. Within the next three years, bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies springing up like Backflip, Blink, Quiver and others. Viable models for making money did not exist so this early period of tagging failed as the dot.com bubble burst. Contemporary concepts of social tagging took root with the launch of the web site Oneview. See the Supernova video about the site's history. Functional OverviewIn social tagging/bookmarking systems, users store lists of Web resources. These lists are publicly accessible, and other people with similar interests can view links by category, tags or randomly. Some taggers categorize their resources by informally assigned, user-defined keywords. Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks associated with certain "tags", and rank resources by how many other users bookmark them. Social bookmarking services have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from tags assigned to resources by examining clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another. AdvantagesTagging systems have several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine Web crawler/spiders. All tag-based classification is done by human beings who understand the subject content of the resource, as opposed to software which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. This provides for semantically classified tags, which are hard to find with contemporary search engines. Additionally, as people bookmark resources they find useful, certain popular resources are bookmarked by more users. Thus, such a system will "rank" a resource based on its perceived utility. This is arguably more useful for end-users than other systems which rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to them. Since the classification and ranking of resources is a continuously evolving process, many social bookmarking services allow users to subscribe to syndication feeds (see RSS) based on tags, or collection of tag terms. This allows subscribers to become aware of new resources for a given topic, as they are noted, tagged, and classified by other users. DisadvantagesThe drawbacks to tag-based systems are lack of standards (keywords, controlled terms or vocabularies), no standards for tag structure (e.g. singular vs. plural, capitalization, etc.), mistagging due to spelling errors, tags with more than one meaning, unclear tags due to synonym/antonym confusion, highly unorthodox and "personalized" tags and no hierarchical relationships between tags (e.g. sites labelled cheese and cheddar have no way to be linked because cheddar is a more specific category of cheese). The separate (but related) tagging and social bookmarking services are, however, evolving rapidly, and these shortcomings could eventually be addressed. ToolsMost of these tools are free to use on the web, unless you require a premium version.
References
|
(A 
