What Happened to Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is when a community of users compiles an index by collectively submitting ("bookmarking") favorite or relevant sites for the community. To make it work, the sites are tagged with keywords to facilitate searching.

The idea of creating a folksonomy is something I wrote about here in 2008 and earlier. On the surface, it sound rather random and disorganized.

Folksonomy,
the people's taxonomy that is so prevalent on the Web through sites
like delicious, Flickr and Digg, works as long as there is some
agreement on the naming. If I tag something as "satire" but others tag
it as video, or comedy or TV or SNL, does that make it better/broader or
break the system? True taxonomies rely on agreement.  Plant taxonomy
classifies one plant as Gerbera jamesonii so that the common name
"African daisy" or the altered versions of the scientific name ("gerber
daisy" or "gerbera daisy") all point to the same thing. It's not
arbitrary at all.



I ask my students to tag useful sites for my visual design course in delicious with the unique tag of "msptc605"
so that their fellow students can share bookmarks and so that the list
can increase in future semesters. We agree on that tag so that all our
bookmarks can be together, but we also need to have additional tags such
as typography, color, usability so that the list is useful. It's not
arbitrary at all.


It has been enough years that there is a history of social bookmarking. But it seems to me that the use of many of the sites that were the most popular social bookmarking sites in 2010 are not being used as much today.

This video from 2007 was introducing a service like delicious to new users.




But I am not using social bookmarks as much as I did before. My own delicious account that I used for classes has fallen into disuse.

Certainly "tagging" is still being used. But adding the hashtag #edtech to your twitter post is not the same thing as what social bookmarking meant five years ago.

Some social bookmarking sites took a different approach to the process. There was more a "voting" (up or down) approach on the site Digg (which has gone through several rebirths and is no longer really a social bookmarking site). Facebook uses a "thumbs up" Like button for people to indicate to friends that they "Like" a site or post. But these choices are not searchable in any satisfying way and they are not tagged into categories. Newsvine called the headlines there "seeds."

Have Net users outgrown social bookmarking or has the practice evolved to simply tagging in social networks? Is "social tagging" the term to replace "social bookmarking?"

Back in 2006, I asked "Is Folksonomy Taxonomy or Fauxonomy?  Maybe the question is being answered.




Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

Comments

Display comments as Linear | Threaded

No comments

Add Comment

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.
BBCode format allowed
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.
To leave a comment you must approve it via e-mail, which will be sent to your address after submission.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA