SOCIAL BOOKMARKING & TAGGING

Anyone who has ever used the favourites item in a web browser to save and organise favourite web sites can grasp the value of bookmarking. Of course, if you use more than one PC you may have to build up your favourites in two places (or know how to export the favourites file from one browser to another). And while it’s possible to email favourite sites to a work colleague or friend, it’s not easy to allow a colleague to browse all of your favourites.

Enter del.icio.us the bizarrely named, incredibly useful, and absolutely free social bookmarking service. Users visit del.icio.us to create an account, download the bookmarklet to their toolbar and then save any website of interest to their del.icio.us account on the web. But the real magic of deli.icio.us, and similar social bookmarking services, is that when a user saves a web page to their account they are also invited to ‘tag’ it with a key word or words of their choosing. A user’s collection of sites is then searchable by its ‘tags’. In addition, users can view how many other users have bookmarked the same websites, and can review the collections of other users: it’s like looking over the shoulder of a fellow researcher and benefiting from their efforts. This simple service works because it provides an incentive for individuals to put effort into contributing their own content and at the same time adding value by enabling them to share the fruits of the efforts of others.

The same approach is used in CiteULike , a service specializing in storing and sharing information about published academic journal article;and LibraryThing , a service for collating information about book collections. The idea of social bookmarking is a powerful one and the same principle of tagging and searching by tags has also been applied to the incredibly successful Flickr site for storing and sharing and managing photos.

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