MEGO: My Eyes Glaze Over

Social Bookmarking 101

Aug 7, 2007 Social Bookmarking

Some of my readers likely already know what social bookmarking is, some of you may already frequent Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia or StumbleUpon, but I suspect there are a few of you who are thinking “social what?”

Most of us bookmark our favourite websites, we go to the “Bookmarks” menu in our browser and click “Bookmark this Page”. We also spend a lot of time copying and pasting URLs into emails to our friends – “Hey, check out this hilarious video” or “Read this, he is right on the mark!” Social bookmarking combines these two tasks into one, and so much more.

In social bookmarking, users store links to web pages that they find useful – just as they would in their browsers “bookmarks” or “favourite” menu. However, these link lists are either accessible to the public or to a specific network, meaning other people with similar interests can view the links by category, randomly or by tags.

Tags: An Introduction

Tags are a popular topic on this blog it seems! So, what is the big deal with “tags”? With the quantity of information being added to the web everyday we have arrived at a point where the content simply exceeds the ability of anyone to categorize or index it all! The task of processing all that content poses an overwhelming problem – how do you maintain a taxonomy to accommodate the pace at which new content is produced. Solutions are emerging as technology advances- and one such solution is Tagging. Tags categorize the information by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords. By harnessing the power of the large network of humans using the Internet – anyone can contribute to the categorizing of the net – we are able to build and refine the taxonomy as the need arises.

This type of tagging, also known as folksonomy is used on numerous online services including Flickr and Del.icio.us. The key to these systems is that it is collaborative and open – there is no rigid taxonomy. Users can assign whatever tags or labels that they want. To the organized this type of open categorizing might seem more like chaos. With no one controlling the tags, users will obviously develop multiple terms for the same thing. For example if you want to find web sites related to cars you might have to look up “cars” and “automobile or for the city of Toronto you might have to look up “Toronto”, “T.O.” or “GTA“. Of course by looking up “GTA” you will not only find websites about the “Greater Toronto Area” but websites about the game “Grand Theft Auto”. But, as Chris Anderson stated in The Long Tail:

“These probabilistic systems aren’t perfect, but they are statistically optimized to excel over time and large numbers.There designed to “scale” or improve with size. A little slop at the microscale is the price of efficiency at the macroscale.”

Perhaps, order appears out of the chaos.

Del.icio.us: The Basics

For the purpose of this blog post I am going to focus on Del.icio.us simply because it is the one I use. I have recently started using StumbleUpon but I will leave that to a future post. Del.icio.us allows you to import your current bookmarks, which means if you have bookmarks at home and work you can merge these favourites and access them from any computer.

Once you have registered you will be invited to install Del.icio.us buttons and menu onto your browser. The buttons make it a one-click process to add any website you want to your Del.icio.us bookmarks.

Import Your Bookmarks
By visiting the “Settings” page (top right hand corner) you can at any time import your bookmarks from your browser. The instructions on how to save your bookmarks will differ by browser. Essentially you will have to export your bookmarks as an HTML file and then import that file into Del.icio.us. You can edit these bookmarks, add notes, and tags. You can also delete them.

Add New Bookmarks
With your Del.icio.us browser buttons you can simply click on the “TAG” button to add a new bookmark. For example let’s say I am going to tag “Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things” . A window will pop-up :

The URL will already be listed, and often so will the Description (if the site had previously been bookmarked). All you have to do is add your notes and your tags that will help you find the URL later (or to explain the website to friends). So for Boing Boing you might use:

Description: A directory of the weird and wonderful
Tags: blogs culture

For pages that have already been bookmarked by others you will be given a list of suggested tags or “popular tags”. Once you have started bookmarking – it may also give you “recommended tags” a list pulled from your existing list of labels.

Share Your Bookmarks
If all Del.icio.us did was save your bookmarks so that you can access them from anywhere – it would be a cool app – but mediocre. That is, of course, not all you can do! Just by posting a link and tagging it you are sharing it with other Del.icio.us users. (You can make links private too – just visit the “Settings” section for details on how to do this.)

If I want to share this hilarious video, (Warning: I think it is funny, Anton says its annoying) called Fast Food Freestyle. It has been saved by only 8 people (apparently not too many people think this is amusing). If I wanted to share this with my network as I am tagging it I will be given the opportunity under “Your Network” – where it will list people in my network – and I just click to share! If , however, you want to share a link that you have already bookmarked you will need to click on “edit” by the URL link, this will bring up the basic fields: URL, Description, and tag. For some reason you need to go to the bottom of this box to “Full-screen edit” – in order to bring up the “Your Network” list. From here find your friend and click to add them. I sent the link to my brother the blogger over at OMOVO – so Jeff did you think it was funny?

Find New Bookmarks
For example you want to find out more about the television show Heroes. You can find bookmarked sites a few different ways:

• In the upper right hand corner type “Heroes” and choose Del.icio.us – click Search. This will show you a list of sites either tagged “Heroes” or with “Heroes” in the title. It will also show you a list of related tags (tv games series nathan/peter television) so that you can continue your search.
• Set up a “Subscription”. At the top of the page click on “Subscriptions”, then on the right hand side (bottom of the blue box) click “edit”. On this next page there are two fields “tag” and “Only from this user”. In the tag field type “heroes” and subscribe. You could use the “only from this user” if you happened to notice a user that had similar taste and you wanted to make sure you kept up -to-date on their Heroes bookmarks.

You can of course just browse

• Browse your network, just click on the top where it says “Your Network”. This will bring up the latest bookmarks saved by your network of users. You can scan page by page using the bottom bar “earlier/later”. Or on the right hand side you could simply choose the user name you are interested in browsing.
• I have a subscription set up to find bookmarks on “wordofmouth“, if I happen to see a URL I like, I could also check out other bookmarks the user has posted – just by clicking on their user name. I can then browse through their bookmarks.
• At the top right hand side of the page you can click on “Popular” for the hottest bookmarks, or “recent” for bookmarks just tagged by other users.
• You can also start at the homepage and browse through the “Hot list” and “Tags to Watch” section.

So, start sharing your bookmarks!

Join my network (click on the right)
Subscribe to my Del.icio.us Feed

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