WEEK 6 - Exploring Tagging, Folksonomies and Technorati

#13 Social bookmarking: tagging with Del.icio.us






Lets start with definitions:

Folksonomy - collaborative tagging (also known as social classification, social indexing) is the practice and method of collaborative creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is not only generated by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.

Tags in short are one word descriptors used to describe bookmark content. Users can tag each of their bookmarks with a number of freely chosen keywords. The collective nature of bookmarks makes it possible to view bookmarks by similar minded users.

Social bookmarking website- designed to allow the user to store and share bookmarks on the web, instead of inside of their browser.

Cloud- popularity

Del.cio.us is the most popular social bookmarking service. It lists its primary uses in this order:

• all your bookmarks are in one place
• you can bookmark things for yourself and friends
• you can check out what other people are bookmarking
• you can access your bookmarks from any computers and bookmark from anywhere
• you can use tags to organise and remember your bookmarks

Del.icio.us is well designed, user-friendly and very useful. It is easy to find the specific subject, folksonomies work smoothly with bookmarks, the content of bookmarks is presented in a simple and informative way. It is useful for research, for discoveries, for play. I have a newly acquired interest in futurism, virtual worlds, Second Life libraries and bookmarked a lot of relevant articles. It was interesting to see how popular these subjects are and that many people share my interest. I subscribed to Del.cio.us some time ago but haven't used it much, giving preference too Furl. Furl is similar to Del.cio.us but has one feature which the other lacks - it archives a complete copy of each page that a user bookmarks, making it accessible even if the original content is modified or removed. I find this feature extremely useful and I like the way in which Furl organises and annotates favourites. However, after spending more time with Del.icio.us, thanks to this exercise, I have grown very fond of its tagging system and varied, stimulating content.

There are other social bookmarking sites, worth exploring: Digg, Blue Dot, Stumble Upon. Each of them is slightly different and may have more relevance to a particular user over another. Digg, for example, has an emphasis on technology, and only recently added politics and entertainment to its content.

You can have a look at my Del.icio.us tags and the widgets of Furl's and Digg's favorites.