Reading Mathe’s essay on social bookmarking got me thinking about the practice itself. For the uninitiated, social bookmarking is the practice of using special social bookmarking sites to tag and comment on web pages, so that others may search through them and view them based on the tags one applies to the web page. This video may explain it a bit better then I can.
What excites me most about this practice is the user controlled aspect of it. The amount of information on the Internet defies normal classification methods, like those used in libraries or coporate databases. Those systems are created by highly educated programs with large amounts of time and resources to create them. However, creating a formal classification system for the Internet would take a staggering amount of time and manpower. Social bookmarking offers a much more feasible alternative. Its major advantage over formalized systems is its ease of use and social aspects.
Formalized classification systems require a great amount of time to consider whether or not a piece of information falls into a specific category. Also, as Mathe states, being able to classify things in a formal system also requires a fair amount of education. On the other hand, social bookmarking only requires one to register for a website (most requiring no more than a user name, password, and email address) and they are ready to begin tagging pages. The process of tagging quick and easy as well. One simply clicks on the appropriate icon for the social bookmarking site, types a couple of words that describe the page, and click OK. This speed and ease make many people more inclined to tag websites then if there was a formal system in place.
The second advantage of social bookmarking over formal systems is the social aspect of it. One who classifies things within a formal system submits their classifications to a small group of people for approval. This procedure is slow and can take quite some time. With social bookmarking, ones tags are available immediately to other users, and thus user feedback. Others may give you comments and suggestions on how to better relabel your tags to fit with more widely used terms. This social aspect also aids in the location of information. This way, you still help organize the information and use terms that will make it easier to find.
Social bookmarking seems like its going to be the way of the future. It goes along with the Internet’s theme of user created. Everyday, more and more users are logging in and tagging more and more websites. Others are relabeling tags to over come vocabulary differences between language. The amount of categorized information is growing, as is its clarity. Maybe one day we’ll reach a point where most of the information on the Internet is tagged or categorized in some way. That day may be far off, but I’d suggest looking into this social bookmarking thing, just so you don’t get left in the dust. A couple potential websites to use are:
Well, night folks. Sleep well!
Chris
