- Antonie van Leeuwanhoek
What is all the hype about social bookmarking? Is it a new way to find useful information on the web, or is it just another way for people to occupy their time?
Social bookmarking is what sites like del.icio.us and digg.com are all about. The basic principle of social bookmarking is that people mark sites with descriptive tags. But the tags are shared with everyone else who subscribes to the social bookmarking site you are using. So instead of having private bookmarks in your browser, you can share your bookmarks with others. And as more and more people share their bookmarks, we start to develop ratings for information available on the web.
Say you’re feeling a little down and you want to see if there are any funny blogs you can read. You can log into your social bookmarking site and search for the tag “funny”. Now you can choose from one of the blogs other people have found funny, and if you think it’s funny, you can add your own tag, too. What if you have a favorite blog and you want to see what other people think of it? You can search for that blog and see how it’s been tagged, and even add your own tags. Because we the people are doing the tagging, there’s even a new term to describe what is evolving on these social bookmarking sites – “folksonomy” (a combination of folks and taxonomy) describes how the information on the internet is categorized based on what people like you and me think, not based on some expert sitting in a library or lab somewhere.
Some people might feel that social bookmarking is a “disorganized collection of personal preferences,” and to some extent that might be true. As my professor said, someone could tag my blog with the keyword nudity. It would probably get a lot of hits, but those viewers would be pretty disappointed. Similarly, I might find a website really interesting, but no one agrees with me. If that’s the case, my tag will sink to the bottom while more relevant, popular tags gain strength. In that respect, then, social bookmarking can be called a “democratic taxonomy that allows the community to peer review the content of the Web.” The entire concept of folksonomy implies that categories are built on the strength of people’s agreements about classifications. Questionable classifications will disappear under the weight of the classifications that receive support from the most users.
As someone who’s interested in social network analysis, I can see a parallel between networks of people and networks of social bookmarks – social bookmarking tags are creating new networks of information. For example, if a friend of mine tags my blog with keywords such as blog, typography, and feminism, my blog will suddenly get exposure to a whole new group of people: those interested in typography and those interested in feminism. It’s kind of like that “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game – before, my blog was only read by my friends and my professors. Then suddenly its exposed to new audiences because a friend told another friend, and so on, and so on...
Speaking of which, if you want to see my bookmarks, here's a link.
No comments:
Post a Comment