Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is something I didn’t know existed (I am embarrassed to admit) until I took my technology class at the university, though it is something I wish I had known about. The idea that all those sites I’ve bookmarked at home I can now access from any computer is great. It was always a problem if I was working on a project with someone else to write down the web address and then find it on another computer. And if I misspelled something then I wasted time searching for it all over again. Now not only can I access my sites but I can share them with anyone I want. Below are the social bookmarking sites we reviewed in class with an overview of the highlights and description of what they offer.

Digg –
Digg describes itself as a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. The website states that they’re “here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and [they’re] changing the way people consume information online.” This idea of working collectively gives each voice a chance of being heard. Although not every user will ‘digg’ each item placed on the website they’re “committed to giving every piece of content on the web an equal shot at being the next big thing.” They have clear-cut rules about content and are dedicated to protecting members from spamming and other abuses. I would not specifically call this a bookmarking site though since if a submitted item does not produce enough interest then it is dropped. It is a good site for discussion and posting information that the user wants to make others aware of and get feedback on.

Del.icio.us –
This site seems to be one of the most popular as I see it linked to blogs and MySpace pages all the time. Del.icio.us lets users create tags to organize and remember bookmarks, which they feel “is a much more flexible system than folders.” For me, I like compartmentalizing things into folders with tags as a search option, but I am learning the merit of tags. Del.icio.us also lets the user create a description for each bookmarked site which is helpful as the list gets longer and more difficult to remember what each link was. Using a good description along with the tags helps the user remember and identify if the site is one they need for what they are searching.

Netvous –
“The idea behind Netvouz is that you should always have access to your bookmarks. Regardless if you are at your computer at home, at work, in school, at a friend's place or outdoors surfing from your cell phone.” This site lets users organize bookmarks in folders and tag each bookmark with keywords so they easily can find them. While this seems like just what I was looking for I seem to prefer del.icio.us for some reason. This site does have some great benefits though. It provides an automatic link checker that “cares about your links and regularly verifies that all your bookmarks are valid and alerts you in case they are not. And if a web site is moved permanently we automatically update your links to point to the new address.” Now, that’s service! You can also place an “Add2Netvouz” button to your internet menu to automatically bookmark sites without going to the Netvous webpage. Del.icio.us also offers this option, as does Furl (see below).

PennTags –
This site asks the question - have you ever bookmarked a web page and then cant find it again in your mass of bookmarks? PennTags allows you to add tags to your posts, helping you organize and find posts later. Again it is that idea of user generated social indexing, that makes sites like this interesting. You create your own tags so you are most likely to have a more successful search for the information that you are seeking. You can also create an RSS feed for tags in PennTags, so anytime that tag is used, you will be notified in your RSS feed reader. This is a great way to be notified if something that users are interested in is found by others. The users can then review and keep or delete that site in their own list. There did seem to be some limitations to this site though. PennTags was developed by librarians at the University of Pennsylvania and as far as I can tell you need to be a student or staff/faculty to contribute to this site. I tried to find a user sign-up page and all links took me to the university site which asked for information that wasn’t available to me.

Furl –
While once again this is a site that I have not heard of, I am really surprised that it doesn’t get more press. It seemed to have the most services of all the sites we covered in class. Like other sites when you save a web page, you can assign one or more topics to it. This site differentiates between topics and keywords. “Keywords aid you in finding the page later, but unlike Topics (or "tags") are not as obtrusive. Basically, the keywords you assign are search hints.” Users can also save comments on the page to provide descriptions of content. When users save an item, they can also save a clipping with it, “a quoted portion of the page that is separately displayed and can be used for summarizing the page or identifying the most important part of it.” This is an easy way for user to identify key elements of saved articles. You can apply a rating system to items from 1-5 (worst to best). Furl also builds a full-text index of all your saved pages creating a personal web search engine for users. Furl also provides something that Amazon.com has been using with great success, the recommendation. Based on your activity on the site, Furl will recommend other links and topics to users. They are color-coded to indicate how popular they have been with other Furl members. Another interesting service Furl provides it that they will save a copy of a web page and it is archived for the user. This means that users can access that page and read it any time they need to, even if the web site is down, or the page has changed on the original web site, or even if the page is no longer accessible for free. This is an exceptional service considering how the Internet changes so rapidly, and sites change, move or disappear frequently. The information can still be available to the user.

These social bookmarking sites would be great for online communities created for libraries too. I like the idea of folders because then the library could create different sections for different groups of users, e.g. children, youth/teens, adults, community info, etc. Also library users could add their own bookmarks and tags to help create a fuller taxonomy for the community of users.