Social Bookmarking

We're going to add a section here called Technology Watch that, from time to time, points out interesting new tools and ideas that signal changes in the way in which we learn and collaborate. We won't try to keep up with the tech gurus out there. Rather, we will use this section to point casual users to them and to some of the more interesting recent developments on the web or in the field of new media.

First up is "Social Bookmarking". Social bookmarking begins with sharing your favourite web content --that which you would bookmark (or add to favourites) because you read or saw something even remotely interesting --something you may or may not come back to someday. From a user's perspective it works much like the personal bookmarks (or favourites) you might use in a web browser. But instead of using your browser to store the link you use a public web-based service like Del.icio.us or Spurl. In order to appreciate these tools you have to try them. Here, we can only begin to describe a few of the techniques they employ to make the Web more semantically interconnected.

Much of the power in Social Bookmarking extends from elegant simplicity. These services aggregate your links, and those of others, in a 'central' location. They add tools, like search techniques, and methods of classifying the links by topic, or popularity, for instance. What you have then is a service which models the behaviour, interests, and preferred content of its members. It helps you to manage your own sprawling web experience, to find other like-minded users, and to discover highly recommended content. In typical fashion new applications, and ways of integrating them with other tools are rapidly emerging.

A similar phenomenon occurs in file-sharing networks like Kazaa: when you find a song you like, for instance, you might want to browse the files of the user sharing it for more of a similar taste. Linkblogs, and low-threshold links, and hyperlinks in general, have been connecting like-minded content and users for some time. Effectively, these recent social bookmarking managers just automate, aggregate, and accelerate this process. The added value may be enough to get more casual users in the habit of sharing their bookmarks, to trigger a network effect, and make network collaboration a degree or two more effective and widespread. Mining the data to uncover trends, conceptual maps, and, other "strange attractors" may lead further to tools that make the gargantuan-sized web more accessible, navigable, and even self-organizing.

Where Google judges a web page's importance based on the number and importance of related links, social bookmarking networks rank sites based more on independent individual taste and judgement. Sure there may be a 'group think' phenomenon happening in the echo-chamber that is the Blogoshpere but votes based on individual judgement seem to fit the decentralized, democratic, micro-atomic, meshing principles of the Internet. It seems that new independent and important work stands a much higher chance of finding a large receptive audience through Deli.cio.us or Spurl than on page 29 of a Google search.

More

• Robin Good calls Del.icio.us a "Personalized Adaptive Knowledge Discovery, Mapping And Archival System" and ranks it as a breakthrough tool.
• Read the Spurl.net philosophy