By Simona Dinu, Lauralee Gilmour, Kathryn Klages, Karen Tjosvold

Contents

Introduction

Social bookmarking is a method by which users can publicly store their Internet bookmarks by registering with a social bookmarking service such as del.icio.us. They then use tags (user-generated keywords) to describe or annotate the web page being bookmarked. The user can choose to add no tags, one tag or many tags to each bookmark. When tags are compiled across users, clusters of tags associated with bookmarks begin to emerge. The term folksonomy (based on the words “folks” and “taxonomy”) was coined by Thomas Vander Wal to refer to collaborative tagging across a group of users. Folksonomies may then be used to browse and retrieve information through tags. Folksonomies are bottom-up user-generated systems. They are not hierarchical like traditional taxonomies. One of the great things about folksonomies is that they are dynamic, reflecting up-to-date topics and categories within a group of users.

Since Internet search engines do not understand the content of the material they find, they cannot locate information by meaning or relevance. With social bookmarking, the user can look at all of the bookmarks with a specific tag or he or she can look at all of the pages tagged by a specific user. It is also possible to see the popularity of a web page by the number of times it has been bookmarked. This makes the use of social bookmarking, tagging and folksonomies an excellent way to learn about and share resources.

However, there are some drawbacks to the use of social bookmarking, tagging and folksonomies:

  • One is that there is little emphasis on privacy. Many services make it difficult to make your bookmarks private, especially once they have been made public a first time;
  • Another is that tagging communities are limited by the language spoken, as users will tag in their own languages;
  • Although it has not been a big issue so far, social bookmarking is vulnerable to spamming; and
  • Tags can be ambiguous, subjective, vague and vulnerable to misspellings - and there is no controlled vocabulary, so there are often several synonyms in use for the same topic.

To those accustomed to using traditional classification schemes to retrieve information, folksonomies can appear messy, imprecise and unstructured. However, many argue that, in fact, folksonomies can act as a useful and complementary form of classification (see Hammond et al). Others, such as Lars Pind are looking at ways to make tagging more organized.

Current Major Social Bookmarking Sites

As most sites do not disclose their user numbers, it is difficult to determine comparative popularity of most of the social bookmarking sites. However, some believe that del.icio.us and StumbleUpon dominate the market. This section describes several of the more popular sites.

del.icio.us
del.icio.us is a service that provides a way for people to organize their favourite websites. Much like many other social bookmarking services, del.icio.us is not private; therefore, whatever information one puts in becomes available for everyone to see. The way this service works is that one creates an account and then he/she can add sites at any time. The account can be accessed from virtually any computer that has Internet access and multiple users are allowed at the same time in one account. The websites are then tagged and each is described by as many tags as necessary. Further, the tags can be organized into bundles, so that finding a favourite site becomes even easier. In addition to this, del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site because it allows users to see what other people have saved under a particular tag and which tags are most popular for a particular site. It enables people to see what others are reading on similar topics and to access sites that can be useful to them.

StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon enables “social surfing” – it retrieves websites that other Net surfers deem relevant to you according to your user profile. You create this profile by registering for a free account and selecting your interests from approximately 500 topics that are of interest to you. You rate sites (with a Siskel-esque thumb up or down) and that recommends (or rejects) that site for future Stumblers who share that topic of interest in their profile. You activate StumbleUpon from your toolbar and begin your journey of Stumbling across and rating sites. User comments on StumbleUpon reflect enthusiasm, but also frustration with the fact that StumbleUpon might only support one user profile per CPU.

Yahoo My Web 2.0
Yahoo My Web 2.0 is taking a new approach to community-based searching. Users create a personal web and interact with a trusted community of contacts, upon whose expertise their searching relies. This communal web employs a social search engine that simultaneously enables networking and bookmarking. The members of a trusted community are relying on each other to generate better search results. This is made possible through tagging - a new component to My Web. In fact, a major reason that Yahoo! acquired Flickr was to benefit from its tagging expertise. My Web 2.0 employs its own “relevance algorithm” called “MyRank” - a search engine that exclusively searches your community web. My Web 2.0 concentrates on community-based searching (whereas My Web 1.0 focused on individual-based searching).

Slashdot
Slashdot predates the social bookmarking phenomenon, having been created in 1997, but it is a forerunner of the social bookmarking news sites. Users themselves submit links to news articles, and the site’s editors choose which to display on the front page. Slashdot readers can
then comment on the articles. Unlike more modern social bookmarking news sites, articles to be “Slashdotted” are not chosen by the votes of readers, and there is no tagging function. This may explain Slashdot’s recent decline in popularity.

Digg
Digg is a social bookmarking site devoted to news. Users submit links to news stories, and other users vote on them (or “digg” them). The most popular stories appear on the homepage, sometimes within minutes of their original posting; alternatively, if a story does not receive
enough “diggs” within twenty-four hours, it drops out of the upcoming stories queue. Digg has become tremendously popular among technically oriented users, and has in fact eclipsed Slashdot among this demographic, probably due to its more user-driven structure.

Newsvine
Newsvine is another social news site, with a twist: users get a personal page (at the-person’s-username.newsvine.com) where they can link to articles, blogs, etc. and even write their own columns. Users’ personal pages update automatically to show articles they vote for on Newsvine, or comments they post on the site.

Furl
Furl is both a social bookmarking tool and a personal archive; it saves a copy of each page a user bookmarks. This can obviously be very useful. For example, if a blogger links to a site through Furl, future readers will be able to see the linked material as it existed when the
blogger made his or her original comments on it - even if the site itself has changed or no longer exists. One can also keep one’s own personal bookmarks on Furl and no longer have to deal with broken links.

Granted, this does rely on Furl’s continued existence, but Furl is less likely to disappear suddenly than are many other webpages (especially pages with continually changing content!) Furl is of course also useful in the usual social bookmarking ways, such as sharing bookmarks,
tagging, and finding good sites on a particular topic.

Flickr
Flickr is a photo sharing website, thus it is a unique social bookmarking tool because it contains digital images. Flickr serves the same purpose as the social bookmarking tools that contain links because Flickr photos are also tagged and browsed. Folksonomies are at work in Flickr, where users generate their own tags and organize their photos into sets. In fact, Flickr was among the first websites to introduce tag clouds.
A Flickr account is free to any user and the albums created within can be made private or public. Flickr is among the most well known social bookmarking tools and boasts a wide user base. It was developed by Vancouver-based Ludicorp in 2002, and was acquired by Yahoo! in March of 2005.

YouTube
This is another example of a social bookmarking tool that deviates from the concept of linked text. YouTube contains videos - frequently homemade videos. YouTube users upload video clips, comment on their own and each others’ videos, share their videos across the web, and can even include them in their own Web sites or blogs. YouTube users tag each clip themselves and whenever a clip is played the page shows a half-dozen videos that are tag matches. The option exists to view other videos by the same user. YouTube is a popular social bookmarking tool (as proven by its sale price of $1.65 billion USD to Google earlier this week).

Connotea
Connotea is a free social bookmarking site that is geared towards clinicians and scientists. Users can save and tag links to any web pages that they want to remember and/or reference. This can include pages such as PubMed entries, Amazon product pages or book pages. What Connotea will do is recognize the reference and, if possible, automatically add in the bibliographic information. You can also export Connotea links into desktop reference managers. Connotea also allows the sharing of all, or
portions, of your library with colleagues by choosing the references to share and then sending a link to them by email. Or, as in other social bookmarking managers, other users can simply browse by tag or user to see what colleagues’ libraries contain. Links are public by default,
but if you choose, you can make them private, or visible only to a selected group of Connotea users.

CiteULike
Much like Connotea, CiteULike is another free bookmark manager with the aim of helping academics store, organize and share their academic papers. Scholars can bookmark and tag links to any web pages of interest and CiteULike will automatically extract the citation details (for supported links). Library contents can also be exported to reference managers such as Endnote. On the home page, users can browse the most recently posted papers are listed, as well as a tag cloud based on the most active tags.

Choosing the Best Social Bookmarking Site for You

There are now so many social bookmarking services to choose from, it is hard to know which will best meet your needs or those of your patrons. Each service may offer different features and may represent different types of communities. Here are some places to look that provide reviews and comparisons of various social bookmarking managers and tools:

In addition, some social bookmarking tools worth mentioning include:

  • The use of RSS to allow users to subscribe to syndication feeds for tags or collections of tag terms.
  • Onlywire is a service that lets you sign up with several bookmarking services and then it integrates the bookmarks.
  • PopUrls shows the current top links at many popular social bookmarking sites (unlike Onlywire, users cannot choose which sites should be displayed).


Examples of Libraries and Social Bookmarking

On blogwithoutalibrary.net, Amanda has compiled a list of libraries that save bookmarks using del.icio.us. These bookmarks may be used for internal purposes, to share links between staff members, or may be intended as a resource for patrons. For example, Lansing Public Library provides a link on its home page to its daily del.icio.us bookmarks.

The Courtneypark Branch of the Mississauga Public Library also uses del.icio.us to organize websites for staff use. This was implemented a few months ago, and staff are continually encouraged to access their staff bookmarks. del.icio.us is the perfect tool for this because it allows multiple users at one time under one account. All staff have the ability to add content, although it is possible to limit that and allow only certain staff to make changes to the account.

The bibliographic Services Department at York University operates Bib Blog using Blogger. In order to work around Blogger’s lack of categories, Bib Blog uses the tags of a del.icio.us account to comprise its Index. This is a clever way to use social bookmarking and tagging to offset the limitations of a blog tool. Similarly, the Lakeland Library Services site uses its del.icio.us account to navigate across various pages within the University of South Florida website.

Libraries can also syndicate their bookmarks using RSS, as does the Thomas Ford Memorial Library using a thomasford del.icio.us account. The Maui Community College Library actually syndicates its del.icio.us RSS feed on its website (see under “Our Current Interests”). The Maui Community College Library has also created a MySpace account wherein it personifies the library as a 32 year old female.

Unalog is a social bookmarking application designed by a librarian. As it is open source, anyone can freely download it from SourceForge, set it up on a server, and modify the code as desired. Currently the most popular site using this software is www.unalog.com, and it has a number of librarian users. Unalog offers more advanced searching than most social bookmarking sites (including Boolean commands, wildcards, and limits), and perhaps in future it will achieve
some OPAC integration capability.

Jenny at the The Shifted Librarian discusses how social bookmarking can even be used as a marketing tool, and explains Why RSS and Folksonomies are becoming so big. The readership of a library’s blog or website could be expanded by diligently tagging new content in del.icio.us as soon as it appears. These tagged resources become visible to a wider online community thereby granting more exposure to tagged library web resources such as subject guides and reading lists.

LibraryThing is a site that allows users to organize books. Similar to del.icio.us, which provides a way of organizing websites, LibraryThing organizes books. Users create an account and then add books to their virtual library. It could be used to add books one has read, owns, or is interested in reading in the future. Books are then searched for in either Amazon or Library of Congress (or another of 60 sites) and are added to the library. Titles are tagged with as many appropriate tags as necessary and displayed in 5 different styles. Book covers may appear when they are available and the books can be sorted in a variety of ways. LibraryThing is useful because not only does it allow for users to create their own catalogue and to share information with one another (like del.icio.us, all the information is public and one can see what books other users are
reading that are similar to a particular title), but also because the content can be syndicated on a blog or site. Thus, the sidebar of one’s blog can display the books one is currently reading see: http://simonas-blog.blogspot.com/.

Libraries, Social Bookmarking, and the Future

Besides using social bookmarking tools to tag web pages of interest, librarians are beginning to explore the development of social bookmarking tools that would allow users to tag items in the OPAC. This would create folksonomies to be used for searching and browsing within a library’s
collection, as well as for managing Internet-based links.

Here the Shifted Librarian shares a mockup of a tag-cloud based on an OPAC.

Dave Pattern takes this one step further to create a “subject cloud” that is linked to the OPAC at his library. However, these are not user-generated tags.

Finally, University of Pennsylvania has created PennTags. According to the About section, community members can use PennTags to tag URLs, as well as items in the University of Pennsylvania’s online catalogues. Members of the community can also subscribe to RSS feeds for specific tags so that they can be notified anytime the tag is used. There has been some discussion regarding the fact that an academic library is encouraging students to use folksonomies while all other libraries are using controlled vocabulary. Many librarians feel strongly that by teaching and encouraging these skills, students will expect to find the same at other libraries and will find themselves overwhelmed with searches in a regular OPAC.

The Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County used YouTube to broadcast its promotional video for its summer reading program. Social video sites already contain a surplus of videos filmed in libraries - a search for “library” in YouTube nets over 3,000 videos. Considering that YouTube receives 20 million visitors in a month, this video social software provides a new forum for library outreach, promotion, and orientation. A library can gather its video clips on a channel dedicated to that individual library. This is an opportunity to meet the patrons in an online community where they are already gathering in huge numbers.

Social bookmarking tools are a great way for libraries and their patrons to organize and share resources. Do you know of libraries that are using social bookmarking in interesting ways? Or do you have some great ideas about how libraries might use social bookmarking in the future? We would love to hear your thoughts!