Social Bookmarking: Mark It, Manage It, Share It

When was the last time you tried to find a key paper or item, that you knooooow you saw somewhere on Google a few months, or even a few hours ago, but suddenly now can’t find again, search as you might …

— Declan Butler, 'Thin Blogs', RSS, and 'Social Bookmarking' December 7, 2005.

From Elizabeth I’s fringed silk bookmark (one of the first references about the use of bookmarks) to Internet Explorer “favorites” and the “live bookmarks” of Mozilla Foxfire, readers and researchers have used various means to keep track of their reading and learning.

When Elizabeth I used her bookmark in 1584, she was protecting a rare and precious commodity, the printed book, by marking her place. Fast forward to 2006 with much of what we want to know now found online. We’ve grown used to marking and saving our favorite web sites. But our electronic filing can feel just as cumbersome as overflowing folders in a metal file cabinet. How might emerging technologies help us?

Recently, Internet users have discovered social bookmarking, a social computing tool for storing what’s important—and for sharing it with others. Often, the online services for bookmarking are open source and free. Users build their libraries by creating keywords, or tags, and linking related articles and other resources. Social bookmarking’s system of tags and links—two of the greatest inventions in the past 50 years, according to Kevin Kelly, a cofounder of Wired Magazine—lets users access other bookmark collections and add them to their own. By building community profiles, users with common interests discover one another and resources they might not have otherwise come across, even after endless keyword selections and clicks on a search engine. An online library could include not only the user’s bookmarks and comments, but also easily accessible links to related tags (or subject areas), and the links of users with shared interests.

One popular example is del.icio.us, where users post and review bookmarks that range from foreign language courses (such as learning Chinese by daily podcasts) to digital photography tutorials and lessons learned for startup companies. Another site, Connotea, is geared to scientists. Launched in 2004 as a result of seeing the possibilities that del.icio.us provided for the general public, Connotea helps scientific communities manage and share their references (Ben Lund, Tony Hammond, Martin Flack, and Timo Hannay, “Social Bookmarking Tools (II): A Case Study,” D-Lib Magazine, April 2005).

There are disadvantages to social bookmarking. Although the organization of social bookmarking is flat with no folder fuss, the tools are still evolving and not all are user-friendly. Also, people create the tags. As a result, they create a level of meaning and context not found in current search engines (Wikipedia on Social Bookmarking). However, no consistent standards and management exist for tags, which can create confusion and result in wasted time.

What Lies Ahead?

The current focus of social bookmarking services is on individual users, but some trends point toward more collaboration and group use.

Organizations across sectors, from manufacturing and software companies to health care and social services, could make use of social bookmarking systems to more effectively serve their clients. Social bookmarking could also help professionals who need to easily store, access, and share information.

As a Nature.com reporter, Declan Butler sees the benefits of social bookmarking for science journalists, who must sift through and analyze large amounts of technical information daily. Further, they can share more of their resources, through article links, with colleagues and readers.

In another area, the marriage of social bookmarking to the digitization of books (Google’s current book-scanning project has provoked a mix of opinions) offers the potential to expand reading as a community activity. As Kelly notes in a recent New York Times article:
 “Bookmarks can be shared with fellow readers. . . . You might get an alert that your friend Carl has annotated a favorite book of yours. A moment later, his links are yours. In a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world’s only book” (“Scan This Book,” May 14, 2006).

In colleges and universities, students and professors could use social bookmarking systems to share course-based knowledge from one year to the next, leaving a “legacy for the next generation” of students and faculty (Tony Hirst, “Towards a Managed Social Bookmarking Environment in Higher Education,” November 4, 2005). To better serve adult learner groups, support staff in academic advising, career services, and counseling could create bookmark communities.

Finally, social bookmarking might offer relief not only for researchers, students, and teachers, but also for the general public. With the abundance of online information, lifelong learners across sectors often feel overwhelmed and left behind. Through this electronic word of mouth, learners can mark it, manage it, and share it.

--Mary Beth Lakin

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This page last updated on 6/2/2006