Social bookmarking - more than meets the eye

>Recently I've been exploring social bookmarks and pondering the implications for KM.

Introducing Del.icio.us

A simple and easy way to get to grips with this powerful social bookmarking tool.

Blog tutorial

It is hard to articulate my excitement / gut feel that this going to be something important to knowledge workers - I just feel it!!

Here are some thoughts:

Advantages of social bookmarks

* storing key links on the net vs. on a local computer - allows access from any machine at any time, e.g. the local library (old hat, Backflip did this too)

* a fast and very effective way to keep track of stuff - this means you are not waiting for the Google spider to visit any longer. You can get a RSS ping as soon as a link is added.

* examining tags per link, gives you a feel for how the rest of the world sees things vs. your private ontology.

* using a 'secret' group tag allows group members to alert each other of key links - a pull rather than e-mail push mechanism.

* applying 'flat' tags (single words) is far more flexible than operating within a hierarchy of folders (facetted classification).

* monitoring 'new' links on the delicious 'front page' or 'popular' page gives a feel for breaking news.

On a more speculative note:

1. The tags used by an individual provide an emergent interest profile as the frequency is tabulated you get a semi-quantitative way to characterize their current domain focus - provided they are using Delicious for dumping most of their important links.

2. The tag 'profile' for any URL provides a way to appreciate the relationships between that object and an aggregate of world views. This helps with evaluation and clarification of meaning - kind of 'how others see this'.

As this genre develops I'm sure we will see tags being used in very interesting ways, e.g. 'toberead', 'project_abc', 'great stuff' and other personal or group categories. These are early days - Delicious only started in mid November '04 !! I expect to see flat tags used in many applications in the year ahead, with some very surprising results.

Collecting thoughts - please contribute.

Comments

[Mike]

I agree wtih you that it will be very interesting to see how this develops and we will see lots of interesting tags emerge. The tag "to read" has already made it to the top 10 list on www.blinklist.com. It is a new site we just launched. If you get the chance to play around with it please let me know.

Mike

[Rup3rt]

Furl is a social bookmarking site from Looksmart with ratings and comments
http://www.furl.net/

Spurl http://www.spurl.net/
is more private than both del.icio.us and furl

[Denham]

Tagging moves along - the next steps:

http://denham.typepad.com/km/2005/01/tags_tagging.html

[Carol H Tucker]

so -- are you still impressed?

[David Kato]

I agree with Rupert. A big fault in del.icio.us is the lack of a good rating system. There is a lot of information, but hard to figure out what going to help.

Another feature that would improve a lot the sense of community is a score to the posters like Slashdot.

One last thing that is missing is a good search engine.

David Kato

[anu]

Yup, del.icio.us is certainly a nice tool - but I think it started in Nov 03 not Nov 04 !!

Combining it with a "content saver" like onfolio or the scrapbook extension for firefox will, if and when it happens, make it even more useful.

anu

[Rup3rt]

Peer review

Works very well. Brilliant for connecting and harvesting in the wider world and seeding new web conversations. Group tags are also a great idea.

One drawback or possible improvement is rating and ranking links. Popularity is an excellent indicator, however in a group or community there is a tighter focus. Group link dumps/systems need to implement or retain a peer based ranking scoring and review.

The *universal* bookmarking tool is still a little way off but there is a home for knowledge snips and there are dozens of new connections coalescing.

Rup3rt