Thing 7: Social Bookmarking and Folksonomies

In the past, annotating information resources was pretty much the exclusive pursuit of librarians -- well not anymore! In the Web 2.0 landscape, users are applying their own natural language to describe, organize, and facilitate retrieval to and discovery of online content such as photos, articles, podcasts, and web pages. These user-generated annotations go by many names, including tags, social bookmarks, and social classification.

Why are people doing this? By annotating content themselves they can use language that reflects their own needs and way of looking at the world. They can also group these tags into categories and hierarchies that are meaningful to them (sorry LCSH!) .

People share their annotations with each other in order to help one another find interesting content. For example, users save their tagged content in social bookmarking software such as del.icio.us or Flickr, and then the software organizes the tags so that they are searchable and browseable by others. This community of tags is referred to as a folksonomy.

Folksonomies, according to Thomas Vander Wal (who coined the termed), can be either broad or narrow. A broad folksonomy allows more than one user to tag a digital item (e.g. del.icio.us), thus allowing for a richer system that includes synonyms and more varied vocabularies, whereas a narrow folksonomy generally only allows one user to tag an item (e.g. Flickr). A broad folksonomy usually makes it easier to find information, because information is tagged in many different ways.

Tag clouds are often used in a folksonomy to visually represent user-generated tags. The tags are arranged either alphabetically and/or by popularity. Check out the tag cloud at CiteULike – on the right hand side you’ll see a list of the most active tags, with the most popular tags appearing in a larger font. This tag cloud is automatically generated by the social software.

Exercises

1) del.icio.us

Before you begin, view this fun, short tutorial about del.icio.us:

a) Search del.icio.us for a topic that interests you. Browse the results and note the tags that other users apply to the same topic. Many people use del.icio.us to discover other websites of interest to them. Click on some of these other tags to explore related resources.

b) Set up a del.icio.us account.

c) Copy the URL of a website you're interested in bookmarking. Next login to your del.icio.us account. Click on "post", then paste the URL into the empty field, and lastly click on "save":

d) Fill out the description, notes, and tag fields. Click "save" to complete the process!

e) Examine the information associated with your new bookmark, for example:

f) Check out how some library groups are using del.icio.us accounts.

2) Optional del.icio.us exercise

To make it easier to tag your favorite content, put in a workticket with IT to get a del.icio.us button added to your browser. With this button you’ll be able to bookmark a site easily and quickly just by clicking on it!

3) Explore another social bookmarking site

Pick one from the list of examples and explore it like you did for del.icio.us.

4) Time for reflection: Create a blog post

Create a blog post about your social bookmarking experiences and offer your thoughts about these types of tools. How might you use them in your life? And how do you think libraries might leverage social bookmarking?