Social Bookmarking

byBryan Gall

Social Bookmarking Networks

Wikipedia defines social bookmarking as a method that allows internet users to store, organize, search and manage bookmarks of web pages on the internet with the help of metadata.

Users save the links to web sites they want to remember or share with others.

These bookmarks are usually public, but they can be kept private, or only shared with a specified group or person.

History of Social Bookmarking

Sharing online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList

Del.icio.us was founded in 2003 and coined the term social bookmarking

As del.icio.us took off, many other social bookmarking sites came into existing including Stumbleupon and Digg.

Advantages of Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking systems can rank a resource by how many users have bookmarked it letting users know how many others have found it useful

Social bookmarking provides an easy way to share bookmarks with your contacts

Social bookmarking web sites can be better than search engines because all tag-based classification of web sites is done by humans who understand the content as opposed to software.

Disadvantages of Social Bookmarking

There is no standard set of keywords Some tags can be unclear or have multiple

meanings No mechanism to indicate hierarchical

relationships between tags Due to popularity, spammers have begun to

bookmark the same web page multiple times

Social Bookmarking Examples

Del.icio.us Stumble Upon Digg

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us Login name: bdgall Del.icio.us uses a non-hierarchical keyword

categorization system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with a number of freely chosen keywords

You can view a list of everyone’s bookmarks for a given tag simultaneously

It offers access to most popular and recent pages from its homepage

Del.icio.us has a simple scheme, and is very user friendly making it one of the most popular social bookmarking services

Del.icio.us Homepage

Del.icio.us Toolbar

The del.icio.us toolbar allows you to tag any web site as a favorite or quickly go to your del.icio.us page.

Stumble Upon

www.stumbleupon.com Login name: bdgall StumbleUpon provides a toolbar so that users

can mark if they like or dislike any site they visit.

By clicking the stumble button on the tool bar a user will be directed to a new webpage based on the user’s ratings, ratings by the user’s friends, and ratings by users with similar interests.

StumbleUpon gives users the ability to search other users’ favorites as well

Stumble Upon Homepage

Stumbleupon Toolbar

The stumble toolbar allows users to rate the website where they are currently located and stumble to websites based on their rankings among other things.

Digg

www.digg.com Login name: bdgall Digg combines social bookmarking, blogging,

and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control.

Users submit news stories and websites that are promoted to the front page based on a user ranking system.

Digg Homepage

References

Wikipedia Knowledge gained from class