5 Organising your information
5.4 Social bookmarks
If you find you have a long unmanageable list of favourites/bookmarks you might like to try social bookmarks as an alternative.
Activity – what you need to know about social bookmarks
Read 7 things you should know about social bookmarking by Educause (2005 May). Available from Educause Learning Initiative
Answer the following questions:
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What are the differences between social bookmarks and ordinary browser bookmarks (favorites)?
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What are the benefits of using social bookmarks?
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Are there any drawbacks of using social bookmarks?
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How is tagging different from formal metadata?
Now read the answer
This is what we thought:
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Social bookmarks are stored publicly on a website, whereas bookmarks are stored on your PC. Social bookmarks have tags, that help you identify what the site is about, whereas favorites just have a title and are stored in a folder structure. Social bookmarks are shared whereas favorites tend to be personal.
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You can access your social bookmarks from anywhere. You can see other people's social bookmarks on the same topic, so you might find new information or see things you hadn’t thought about before. You can find people who are interested in the same things as you.
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There may be some dodgy tagging, so people don’t use the tags in the same way as you, or may use the tag in a derogatory manner. You may find you get items that bear no resemblance to what you’re looking for because of the different way people use tags.
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Tagging is done by amateurs, there is no formally controlled vocabulary or taxonomy, and it can be of poor quality. Tags change to reflect current trends. The formal metadata done by professionals has a structure and vocabulary that doesn’t always reflect terminology you would use.
To explore social bookmarks for yourself, try one of the tools listed here:
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Del.icio.us
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Furl
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Spurl
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Feed me links
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Hyperlinkomatic
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Simpy
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Frassle
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Blinklist
Social bookmarking tools are good for:
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exploring current trends and technologies
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small, close-knit communities with agreed tagging conventions
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helping to remember terms that are meaningful to you
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access from anywhere – unlike favorites which are PC-specific
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preserving a snapshot of a site – for example Furl can keep a record for you so if the site should change or be removed you can still see a copy of the original.
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