Thursday, November 23, 2006
Social Bookmarking
I've been having a look at the articles on social bookmarking and I'm thinking it's not that new. I was using Backflip in 2001! I remember then how pleased I was to find a way of bookmarking sites so that I could view them from any Internet connected PC. I was at university at the time and it was very useful to access my bookmarks at home and on campus. Of course at the time the social side of it was an add on that I didn't really think about. You could choose to share bookmarks but otherwise it was kept protected by your password. I didn't really think that there was much point to sharing my favourite sites. That was until I started planning my wedding and thought that it had taken me so much time to find decent sites that perhaps I could share the information. Backflip went bust but it has now been taken over by it's ex-employees http://www.backflip.com/login.ihtml I haven't used it for a long time and I don't know how it compares to del.icio.us but it might be worth a look.
The change is that now the social bookmarking sites default to sharing your bookmarks but you can keep some private if you want to.
The concept of assigning your own tags was something I first came up against with gmail http://mail.google.com I like the way you can assign multiple tags to e-mails rather than choosing which folder to put them in.
As the 7 things you should know about social bookmarking and the ">infotangle discussion mention: there are positive and negative aspects to social bookmarking. Again I think it is an information literacy issue. It is a positive way to make people organise their sources of information and it may lead to them finding other relevant sites. As a way of retrieving information it may lead to popular sites but will be useless for scenarios where a good recall of information is required.
Am I the only person who hates the term folksonomies?
The change is that now the social bookmarking sites default to sharing your bookmarks but you can keep some private if you want to.
The concept of assigning your own tags was something I first came up against with gmail http://mail.google.com I like the way you can assign multiple tags to e-mails rather than choosing which folder to put them in.
As the 7 things you should know about social bookmarking and the ">infotangle discussion mention: there are positive and negative aspects to social bookmarking. Again I think it is an information literacy issue. It is a positive way to make people organise their sources of information and it may lead to them finding other relevant sites. As a way of retrieving information it may lead to popular sites but will be useless for scenarios where a good recall of information is required.
Am I the only person who hates the term folksonomies?
# posted by Jessica @ 2:48 pm 
