How I Use It: Social Bookmarking

Bookmarking is a process of saving web pages that you want to access on your web browser. Many people use the favourite option in Internet Explorer to bookmark pages. Where there are many bookmarks they can be organised into folders. Whilst this allows quick links to useful resources it has the disadvantage of only being available when using the computer used for bookmarking. Apple has improved this by synchronizing bookmarks between Apple computers and other devices but this is only available for compatible Apple products. Social bookmarking denotes the practice of saving links to a public website rather than an individual computer. The reference or link to the site can then be accessed from any device which can connect to the internet. Only the link to the website is stored in this process rather than a link to specific documents and like bookmarking on your web browser, it will only be effective whilst the URL remains active. Social bookmarking was pioneered by Delicious in 2003 who introduced tagging to the internet community. Other sites offering this service include Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Diigo. Most social bookmarking sites are free, although added benefits on some of the sites can attract a monthly fee. Flickr is a similar tool which is used for organizing and sharing images or photos. There are many advantages to using social bookmarking, particularly if you access the internet using more than one computer. In particular, the use of tagging or attaching metadata through the use of keywords gives the ability to organize and search your bookmarks efficiently. Recently the use of metadata has been expanded to allow organization of e-mail, multimedia files and webpages allowing you to search large quantities of electronic information using keywords. Social bookmarking sites also allow you to share your bookmarks with others who have similar interests and you can create special interest groups and online communities with access to shared resources. This is an invaluable tool within the educational setting; it allows you to direct groups of trainees to useful resources, organise online journal clubs and enable collaborative working and sharing of ideas on particular resources. The term ‘Folksonomy’ has been coined to describe the development of a community-based structure of keywords to organize unique resources in support of such collaborative working. Bookmarking sites also allow individuals to add ratings, comments and web annotation which facilitates discussions within online groups and communities and further increases the benefit of collaborative working. One of the risks or disadvantages of social bookmarking is that the metadata or key words are assigned by amateurs. Without agreed conventions, tagging and comments can be individually biased and also difficult for other users to find information if the keywords are not intuitive to the group as a whole. This can be addressed through using agreed conventions and common keywords if resources are being shared by a group or community. Discipline in coding will save time and improve efficiency of the system but can also be time consuming, particularly initially when there are a large number of resources to organize. Spamming of social bookmarking sites can also be a threat where posts direct users to unsolicited commercial websites rather than quality information. Such misuse is constantly being addressed through development of spam-fighting mechanisms, although this has led, in some cases, to valid content being deleted. These problems tend to be more prominent within the larger communities where there is more potential advantage for spammers. If you are interested in trying a simple social bookmarking tool Delicious is an easy to use free tool which can be accessed at delicious.com. A short explanation of how to use Delicious is available on YouTube entitled ‘Social Bookmarking in plain English, for the rest of us’. If you are interested in many of the additional benefits including web annotation, consider using Diigo. This has a free tool that can be downloaded on computers, iPad and smartphones but does have a subscription cost for unlimited use of all the services. More details can be found at www.diigo.com with useful short demonstration videos on YouTube such as ‘Diigo V5.0: Collect, Highlight and Remember!’. Further information can be obtained from http://www.diigo.com/learn_more.