Social Bookmarking - Past and Present

Social bookmarking is a service based on the web, where users can craete list (or bookmarks) of websites / web pages. These lists are freely available and shared with others in the same virtual community.

Social bookmarking sites organize their content through the use of tags (labels, categories). The popularity of these social bookmarking sites is constantly growing, as they are an easy and intuitive way to identify, classify, sorting and sharing Internet resources through the practice of labeling and categorizing bookmarks (known as tagging). Additional results may be obtained by grouping together multiple tags.

Brief History of Social Bookmarks

The concept of network sharing bookmarks 'can be dated to the mid- 1999, but the first proposals in this respect were of short duration, overwhelmed by the crisis that hit the tech sector after 2001. Social bookmarking becomes a common practice only in September 2003 with the birth of the site del.icio.us, which acts as a trailblazer and still qualifies as a landmark. The 2005 sees the entry in the popular search engine Yahoo! launching My Web 1.0, a social bookmarking service arrived in 2006 to 2.0: though still in beta testing, the program is stable and has attracted more than a million users. Meanwhile, in December 2005 Yahoo! incorporates the social bookmarking service del.icio.us, gaining a position of great importance in the now crowded field of social bookmarking services. Ever wondered how social bookmarking came about? We have some more information about the History of Social Bookmarking.

In a system of social bookmarking users show a catalog of Internet considered in various ways, useful and stimulating. Often these lists are publicly available and other people with similar interests can view them, or randomly divided into categories. Some social bookmarking systems safeguard the privacy, allowing the recording of bookmarks anonymously or not associated with a name.

The categorization of resources is done by 'keywords' (tag) freely and informally chosen by the user. The majority of social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks associated with certain labels (tags) as well as the government of individual Internet resources based on the number of alerts. Many social bookmarking sites have also implemented algorithms to obtain results from research conducted on groups of keywords.

Social Bookmarking These Days

The Social bookmarking is a service that allows you to share with other users bookmarks (favorites or bookmarks) on the Internet. Although the first providers of social bookmarking are born more than a decade ago, the phenomenon has exploded in recent years. The bookmark, social bookmarking phenomenon before, were saved in your web browser, but instead using the social bookmarking service, you can create a list of bookmarks accessible not only by using a different browser, a cell phone but also from other network users .

You can put together at a comment and tag these descriptive keywords (labels). Through these tags, any user can do a search for a word and find the links posted by users of social bookmarking service. The method of classification of resources is to enter the folksonomy: a taxonomy based on tags entered by users to describe the link.

Social bookmarking is in competition with the world of search engines. Unlike search engines that use a method of hierarchical classification of resources (called top-down), the social bookmarking service exploit folksonomy and all that entails : pros and cons. Users enter, catalog and comment on the resources under the principle humans do it better (literally: the man does it better) than a spider software, see the example of the OPD. Among the disadvantages, however There are the lack of a common set of keywords, the use of a uniform structure of the tag (name declination, conjugation of verbs ...), use of synonyms and antonyms, or homonyms incorrectly more words (fruit or fish = fish). Problems are also found naturally in searches carried out with the most proven search engine.

Among the favorites among the search results appear in the user first positions the resources that have been reported more frequently. Here lies a major problem that suffers this service: spam. The more a resource is shared by users and more will be in the top of the results. So many spammers create fictitious users that link to resources that might want to promote the tagged competitive or very popular. It is the recent case of Trackback Submitter tool that allows spamming through social bookmark service, which countermeasures have also created problems for legitimate users of sb

The greater the number of true service users sb and greater system reliability, however the much-talked-about Web 2.0 will be much more oriented than the folksonomy taxonomy top-down approach used until now. So much so that major search engines have each created their own social bookmarking service (Google Bookmarks, Yahoo My Web ...). What seems to prevail, however, is a compromise between the two methods, in order to reduce the disadvantages of both to build a modern and robust classification method by combining the benefits of folksonomy with the advantages of traditional taxonomy.