Social Bookmarking Demon - An intro to tagging & folksonomy
  • 15 years ago
Social Bookmarking Demon - A short presentation from the guys at http://www.bookmarkingdemon.net A highly useful and very popular search system has developed with the advent of the recent Web 2.0 technologies. This is of course the phenomena known as social bookmarking. When the end user is locating resources that are relevant and useful to them, they are bookmarking it which usually means that the information is valuable. Social bookmarking works on the principle that if an information resource has been bookmarked, it then has some use, and then it's value could be shared. It works on a similar principle to the normal bookmarking systems built into most browsers. Once a user brings up a website or page that they find valuable, they then bookmark it. That bookmark however is made on a social bookmarking site, rather than on the user's PC. These sites hold vast collections of bookmarks that are shared and distributed around the world. The bookmark is tagged, which is where some words are entered that describe what the bookmark link is about, so that the information can have searches made against it. Social bookmarking has similarities with a wiki, because the system's users manage the tags that accompany the bookmarks. Like a wiki, inaccurate tagging information will be filtered out over time, making the bookmark collection highly relevant to the subject being searched for. Social bookmarking has picked up a semi-scientific phrase, known as folksonomy. This is effectively a mash up of two words: folk and taxonomy. Taxonomy is a methodology of scientific classification and identification. By combining the word folk, the idea is to allude to a system of group classification and identification. However, when compared to taxonomy, there are a couple of problems with this community-based method. Due to it being a collaborative system, there is no solid and determined way for defining a common language. This effectively means that the vocabulary used for the tagging is different each time for each ...