Web-based Bookmarking aka Tagging and Social Bookmarking

Put your cans of spray paint away, we are all mature academics here, so "tagging" in this context means labeling websites with your keyboard. Tagging is a much larger issue than web-based bookmarking, so for the purposes of this blog I am going to take web-based bookmarking first and then expand to tagging and social bookmarking in general.

Long, long ago in the early days of the web if you wanted to save the URL of a website you had to type it into a list you stuck up somewhere safe and secure. A major improvement to that filing method was the bookmark option soon built into most browsers. That has drawbacks also though -- first you have to build appropriately named folders to file those links in and then you have to be able to remember which folder you put the links into. Almost worse, the bookmarks were only saved in one browser on one computer. As we begin to collect more and more computers and more and more browser options the bookmark we want is almost always on the "other" computer, the one you don't have under your fingertips at the moment you need the link.

Social bookmark software services solve both of those problems - they use a semantic tagging process to let you put more than one label on each website, increasing the likelihood you will be able to find it again in a couple of months and they exist online in an account that you can access from every computer everywhere

An example of of a web service that allows you to do this is del.icio.us. To use delicious you sign up for an account, which gives you a place to save URLs of web-sites that interest you. Many browsers will let you download and install a plugin for del.icio.us that allows you to access your account automatically from the browser. In Firefox the plugin looks like this:


The first button opens a tag search feature in your browser (next graphic), the second button opens the tagging window so you can tag the website you are currently accessing (third graphic).







If you do this enough you eventually develop your own tag cloud - set of tags you commonly use. You also contribute to the both general tag cloud and the tag clouds of your friends, thus the name "Social Bookmarking".

On Del.icio.us my list of recent links looks like this:

It's interesting to note that Del.icio.us notes for you how many other users have tagged the same web-site you just tagged.

On Del.icio.us's home page they link you to commonly used tags (this is a tag-cloud):
Tags that I have used that others are also commonly using are highlighted in red. This may be a not-so-subtle attempt to guide tagging semantics or just an interesting piece of social commentary. Tags that are used more often are typically larger than less frequently used tags. Tag clouds like this can be organized in a variety of ways, from size (frequency) to alphabetical to geographical.

Here's a link to a new video from Lee LeFever on Social Bookmarking: http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english



In the next post we'll look at various web-sites that extensively utilize tagging such as gmail and Flickr.

Lisa