This week I have been exploring
the world of social bookmarking. While I have heard of this Web 2.0 tool in the
past I haven’t known much about it beyond its name. So I decided to start with
this question:
What is Social Bookmarking?
To answer this question I did
what I always do when I don’t know something- I asked Google. As always Google
provided me with a wealth of information including this YouTube clip. This clip taught me that a social
bookmarking site allows you to save all your web bookmarks in one place and
give each bookmark tag/s or keyword/s to describe the site. These tags increase
the findability of bookmarks as they’re sorted by the keyword you give them.
The way that these bookmarks become social is that they’re public and as such
other users can see them and use them to discover new information about a topic
or use the same tag to add bookmarks themselves.
Some different types of Social Bookmarking sites…
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| CiteULike Homepage CiteULike
CiteULike is a social bookmarking
site which has an academic focus. It allows users to manage their scholarly
articles as well as discover new references that their peers have shared. It
also allows the storage of PDF files.
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Delicious allows users to store
and sort their bookmarks using tags and share them online. It also allows users to
discover what others have bookmarked on any number of topics.
Kaboodle focuses on ‘social
shopping’. It allows users to recommend items by posting links to shopping
websites while also allowing users to discover new products.
Apparently Twitter is
the most popular social bookmarking site. It allows you to share links with others
and tag the link. But an issue maybe finding a link you have tweeted months
ago. If you want to look at the top 15 social bookmarking sites click here
Some of the difference
between these Social Bookmarking tools and desktop products such as EndNote?
One of the main differences I can see has to do with accessibility and
sociability. Social bookmarking is just that, social. It allows you to create
an organised place to store your bookmarks in an environment that has the
potential to be accessible to anyone anywhere in the world. For instance
academics can share and keep track of what other’s all over the world have
tagged and bookmarked relating to a certain scientific issue. This is in
contrast to EndNote which seems to be more private. To share your EndNote
references you have to email them to your peers/friends. You can also share
your references using EndNote Web. But this requires that the person you want
to share with also has EndNote Web. Another potential difference between the
likes of Delicious and EndNote relates to referencing. EndNote allows you to
create correct in-text citations and reference lists in a word document using
numerous different referencing styles. The likes of Delicious doesn’t let
you do this (though CiteULike does).
Something
which annoys me slightly about EndNote is that it doesn’t support Android devices. This is in
contrast to Delicious that supports both Apple and Android mobile devices. I
think that this contributes to the accessibility differences in social
bookmarking tools and desktop products. I often use my tablet as a laptop so it
annoys me that I can’t use Endnote on it.
Using Social Bookmarking in an
Information Management context…
Social
Bookmarking has the potential to benefit Information Management professionals in
numerous ways. Here is just a couple-
- IM professionals could use the likes of Delicious to collaborate with co-workers to create a shared account in which everyone is able to keep track of relevant websites and articles on a particular topic or project.
- Libraries could utilise social bookmarking to create lists of useful links on particular topics.
- Libraries could share links to upcoming events in the library and the surrounding community
