Social Bookmarking is PEOPLE (with apologies to Soylent Green)

Social Bookmarking doesn’t deal with the resources themselves; rather it creates bookmark links. The beauty of these sites is that it allows people to add descriptions to the resource links in the form of free-text comments, a tally of votes that indicate the resource’s value from the perspective of other people who have used it, or tags or keywords. Sometimes, the bookmarking site creates tag clouds to group individual tags into relationship groups. The more a tag is used, the larger the font in which that tag is displayed.

Tag cloud
http://www.winnefox.org/blog/tagcloud.gif

“From the point of view of search data, there are drawbacks to such tag-based systems: no standard set of keywords (i.e., a folksonomy instead of a controlled vocabulary), no standard for the structure of such tags (e.g., singular vs. plural, capitalization), mistagging due to spelling errors, tags that can have more than one meaning, unclear tags due to synonym/antonym confusion, unorthodox and personalized tag schemata from some users, and no mechanism for users to indicate hierarchical relationships between tags.” (Social Bookmarking) For example: learning-organization, learning_organization, learningorganization are all used as tags by Delicious users in addition to learning:organization and think of the possibilities when you turn the singular noun into the plural form: organizations! Without the fixed vocabulary of traditional databases, this could become quite a tiresome search!

Still, tag-based classification of Internet resources and sites has the benefit of human indexing as opposed to software algorithms. People determine the quality of a resource and rankings based upon the number of times a resource has been bookmarked is often a better indicator of value than ranking based upon other sites that link to the resource. As Nations observes: “One of the key aspects of Web 2.0 is human interaction. It is this human component that is taking the Internet to the next level by leveraging the strengths of the human mind with the strengths of a computer's processing power. While a computer is great at reading large amounts of data and searching for defined patterns, the human mind can spot undefined patterns and, more importantly, can detect quality.”

Baker mentions some of the ways in which Social Bookmarking is superior to Search Engine technologies:

• Indexing Sites Faster: Humans bookmark sites launched by their friends or colleagues before a search engine bot can find them.
• Deeper Indexing: Many pages bookmarked are deep into sites and sometimes not as easily linked to by others, found via bad or nonexistent site navigation or linked to from external pages.
• Measuring Quality: Essentially if more users bookmark a page, the more quality and relevance that site has. A site with multiple bookmarks across multiple bookmarking services by multiple users is much more of an authority than a site with only several bookmarks by the same user.
• External Meta Data: Users who bookmark sites tag them with keywords and descriptions which add an honest and unbiased definition which is created by the public and not the owner of the site.
• Co Citation: Social bookmarking sites tend to categorize sites and pages based upon the tags used by humans to describe the site; therefore search algorithms can classify these sites with their peers.
• Number of Votes: Similar to the number of bookmarks, the more votes a page receives on Digg or Reddit, the more useful that information usually is. If the same page receives multiple votes across multiple social news voting sites, the higher quality the site.
• Categorization: Like Co Citation, categorization can help define the subject of a site, therefore better helping the engine address searcher intent.

According to Siterapture, users of social bookmarking services should consider the ability to import/export your bookmarks from/to other places and to categorize and manage large bookmark libraries in addition to the size of user network when choosing a service to use.

http://thesocialmediaguide.com/social_media/social-media-comparison-charts

Works Cited:

Baker, Loren. "125 Social Bookmarking Sites : Importance of User Generated Tags, Votes and Links." SEJ: Search Engine Journal. N.p., 6 Dec. 2007. Web. 20 Nov. 2012. <http://www.searchenginejournal.com/125-social-bookmarking-sites-importance-of-user-generated-tags-votes-and-links/6066/>.

Nations, Daniel. "Social Bookmarking as a Search Engine." About.com. Web Trends.. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2012. < http://webtrends.about.com/od/socialbookmarking/a/bookmarking_se.htm>.

"Social Bookmarking." Wikipedia. n.d. N. pag. Web. 20 Nov. 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmark>.

"What To Look For When Choosing Social Bookmarking Websites." Siterapture. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2012. <http://www.siterapture.com/categorymain.aspx?CategoryID=15>.

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