<$BlogRSDUrl$> Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Internet Happenings, Events and Sources


Monday, April 25, 2005  



Social Bookmarking Tools (I) - A General Review by Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund, and Joanna Scott
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html

Because, to paraphrase a pop music lyric from a certain rock and roll band of yesterday, "the Web is old, the Web is new, the Web is all, the Web is you", it seems like we might have to face up to some of these stark realities [n1]. With the introduction of new social software applications such as blogs, wikis, newsfeeds, social networks, and bookmarking tools (the subject of this paper), the claim that Shelley Powers makes in a Burningbird blog entry [1] seems apposite: "This is the user's web now, which means it's my web and I can make the rules." Reinvention is revolution – it brings us always back to beginnings. This paper reviews some current initiatives, as of early 2005, in providing public link management applications on the Web – utilities that are often referred to under the general moniker of 'social bookmarking tools'. There are a couple of things going on here: 1) server-side software aimed specifically at managing links with, crucially, a strong, social networking flavour, and 2) an unabashedly open and unstructured approach to tagging, or user classification, of those links. A number of such utilities are presented here, together with an emergent new class of tools that caters more to the academic communities and that stores not only user-supplied tags, but also structured citation metadata terms wherever it is possible to glean this information from service providers. This provision of rich, structured metadata means that the user is provided with an accurate third-party identification of a document, which could be used to retrieve that document, but is also free to search on user-supplied terms so that documents of interest (or rather, references to documents) can be made discoverable and aggregated with other similar descriptions either recorded by the user or by other users. This has been added to Social Informatics Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.

posted by Marcus Zillman | 4:10 AM
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