Social bookmarking
While we made an effort to explain how you might improve your use of the bookmarking features of your browser, we did this because so many rely on browser-based bookmarks. Keeping track of bookmarks on your browser is not actually what we would recommend.
To explain why examine the following list of features we have come to expect in a bookmarking system.
- Organize a large collection of bookmarks so that desired bookmarks can be located within the collection.
- Store information with a bookmark so that user can remember what was valuable about that bookmark.
- Access personal bookmark collection from multiple machines and locations.
- Share a subset of bookmark collection while keeping other parts of the collection private.
- Use bookmarks to identify others with similar interests as a way to discover additional resources.
We have ordered this list of desired features so that as you move down the list the desired feature is more and more difficult to find and implement in a browser-based system. It also seems that as you move down this list the benefit highlighted has a social component. For example, the benefit of having a way to share a subset of your bookmarks would offer you as a teacher a way to organize a small collection of bookmarks you would like to offer to your students. The social benefit in this case is a way to offer a resource to others. The final item on our list works in pretty much the opposite direction and suggests that you should be able to make use of a bookmarking system to discover useful resources identified by others.
Social bookmarking. Online bookmarking services, often called social bookmarking sites, offer all of the capabilities we list above. These services are typically available at very low cost or at not cost. Because bookmarking by definition is about storing the addresses of online resources for future use, the one concern some have about software as service applications - what if I cannot connect to the Internet - really does not apply with the tasks online bookmarking services are designed to address. If you are interesting is making use of bookmarks, you must already be connected to the Internet.
Instead of storing bookmarks and related information on a specific computer, social bookmarking services store information online. Because the data are not tied to a specific computer, this approach allow users to make use of their bookmarks from different computers and locations. Like browser-based bookmarking systems, online systems allow the attachment of metadata to each bookmark. Like browser-based systems, the type of data that can be stored varies with the system.
We have not used the word metadata in earlier chapters or in the Primer. This term means “data about data”. In this case, it implies the storage of additional information about a particular online site or service. With social bookmarking you have not created the site the bookmark references, but you have identified the site as useful (because you have bookmarked the site) and you may have added other information about that site that accompanies your bookmark (e.g., tags, description). The metadata should be useful to you in helping you locate the bookmark again (using search or tags) and in helping you identify what you found interesting or useful about the site (from stored notes). The metadata may also be helpful to others. If you share some of your bookmarks, the metadata may also help others gain insight into why you bookmarked the sites that you did.