Social Bookmarking

Book­mark­ing is the prac­tice of sav­ing web site addresses on your per­sonal com­puter to revisit in the future. Social book­mark­ing is the prac­tice of sav­ing and cat­e­go­riz­ing web site addresses on a net­worked com­puter in a pub­lic web site for oth­ers to visit. Social book­mark­ing ser­vices like del.icio.us and Furl let you store book­marks, add descrip­tive tags or key­words, and mark the book­marks as pub­lic or pri­vate. Oth­ers can find your pub­lic book­marks by key­word, by per­son or by pop­u­lar­ity. You can also sub­scribe to lists of book­marks cre­ated by oth­ers. It is a sys­tem that lets you to cre­ate a rich per­sonal col­lec­tion of resources.

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• Tag­ging infor­ma­tion resources with key­words has the poten­tial to change how we store and find infor­ma­tion. “It may become less impor­tant to know and remem­ber where infor­ma­tion was found and more impor­tant to know how to retrieve it using a frame­work cre­ated by and shared with peers and colleagues.”
• Robin Good calls del.icio.us a “Per­son­al­ized Adap­tive Knowl­edge Dis­cov­ery, Map­ping And Archival Sys­tem” and rates it as break­through service.
• Tony Ham­mond et al. call social book­mark­ing a lean ver­sion of blog­ging. “Here the essen­tial unit of infor­ma­tion is a link, not a story — but a link dec­o­rated with a title, a descrip­tion, tags and per­haps even per­sonal rec­om­men­da­tion points.”