Slashdot Mirror
Social Bookmarking Services Revisited
pchere writes "Social bookmarking allows you share bookmarks publicly instead of restricting them to the browser favourites. Del.icio.us is such a fast growing community and its users have created a large number of del.icio.us tools to further enhance the service. Organization by tags allows for quick retrieval of sites by topics and bookmarks are available as RSS feeds. An article in D-Lib Magazine reviews the Social Bookmarking Tools to "remind you of hyperlinks in all their glory, sell you on the idea of bookmarking hyperlinks, point you at other folks who are doing the same, and tell you why this is a good thing.""
Sure, you could go to google's image search, but where else can you easily see, for instance, celebrity nipples or this category?
Just looking at an object, and seeing other tags at the same time is extremely addictive. You can quickly jump to and fro within this kind of taxanomy with little effort. With certain experiments, we've seen a user stickyness not noticed before. And using RSS to monitor a tag is a great way to keep updated on content that you're really interested in.
While http://flickr.com/>flickr.com fantastic, it is pretty generic, I suspect we'll all see a large group of sites dedicated to tagging almost anything (books, products) that are more specific and open to finding a small but vocal niche of people.
Newsfollow.com
I highly recommend anyone who hasn't yet visited this site to check it out.
A good place to look is the page of "popular" sites. Some strange and interesting stuff turns up there fairly routinely.
Stuff like how to cut (i.e. vegetables, meats etc) and Chess strategies among other sometimes bizarre sites.
http://del.icio.us/popular/
but how long before it is filled with spam links, ads, ect? i don't see how they are going to keep it clean
Backflip used to work well for social bookmarking. But now its user base has shrunk so much that it's trivially easy to distort the results in the "What's popular" sections.
A massive global pr0n database?
43rd Law of Computing:
Anything that can go wr
fortune: Segmentation violation -- Core Dumped
With a few hundred million regular users could this sort of thing compete with search engines?
Or would it just become a handy place that search engines would mine for data?
Stop the world; I need to get off.
Not keeping tons of bookmarks is also a good way to reduce info-overload: you only remember the stuff that matters. No more feeling compelled to check up on hundreds of old links (and then cleaning house of the dead ones yet again).
Power to the Peaceful
I went to the article expecting another pseudo marketing piece, but whoa, what's there is quite a detailed analysis of social bookmarking, including a history of bookmarking that brought back my youth when mysterious programs named Archie and Gopher brought me internet content. Someone went through a lot of effort to put this together. There are some interesting conclusions drawn about the differences between search engines and places like slashdot,wiki..community sites where the ranking of the content is done either by machine (search engine) or individuals (community site). I found it interesting to hear a good explanation of why I stopped using bookmarks (when I used to have huge bookmark files) - it became easier to find the same site again through a search engine. Especially when bookmarks become outdated when URL's change.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
Probably read it later.
I am from a small, grease-loving country in the north called Ca-na-da.
The introduction of social bookmarking was ahead of its time. However, with the phenomena of blogging, podcasting, and the like, a revisiting of this idea is a welcome change to our never-ending search for better quality in our instant information-accessing ways. I see some mention about this topic of likening social bookmarking to a search engine, but I fail to see it. A search engine starts with the assumption you have a big pile of mess you need to plod through to find what you want, and casts the widest net possible to do it. While social bookmarking also addresses this assumption, the search for the content you want does not begin in a randomized mess. I have also heard the phrase P2P for categorized search engines, allowing each person who participates to do some of the sorting for you, saving you from the cast-the-widest-net-possible approach of our most popular search engines; a seemingly valid point. I can see social bookmarking doing for searching what RSS did for syndicated news online. I, quite frankly, hope it does.
The Crimson Dragon
You're thinking of the wrong construction. The correct one involves deixis: "Generic reference to social bookmarking communities. Del.icio.us is such a community." Granted, it might also be stress - "This is such a lovely evening!" - but I think that's unlikely.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
If you would like to host a social bookmark script on your own server, you should try Scuttle
- Teja
here is the second part of the article
- Teja
But these are "registered" sites.. they require at least a user name to get in...so it should be easy to limit spammers... after all, a normal person is going to have a 10-1 follow-to-post ratio... because you'd be following existing links more than making new ones. if somebody shows up dumping links it would be pretty easy to spot.
There are many general social bookmark services available, but Digg (along with del.icio.us) is one of my favorites in that Digg focuses mainly on Tech related things. It is starting to become more and more popular and is really worth checking out.
- Teja
One of the benefits of Del.icio.us is that often the popularity of a particular link tells you something about its quality as a data source--but even better, since you can subscribe a a given user's bookmarks, you can use the link poster as another, more accurate, guide to data validity. I'd also like to point out for Mac OS users, that Buzz Andersen's free Cocoalicious is quite nifty, since it works even when the Del.iciou.us server is unavailable, and that Brent Spiner's news reader/aggregator NetNewsWire works well with Deli.icio.us, in part due to the magic of AppleScript, in part because one of its features allows you to subscribe to tag feeds from Del.iciou.us, Flickr, and Technorati.
I love del.icio.us. The only reason I use Firefox over Safari is because of del.icio.us. I have the same live bookmarks on my bookmarks toolbar on my PC, Mac, and work PC, without having to import them when I make changes on one computer. If I bookmark something at work, it shows up on my Firefox bookmarks toolbar at home.
Also, I have a live bookmark on my mother's, and on a friend's computer. All I have to do is tag something as "Mom", or "Joel", and it will show up in their bookmarks in Firefox.
When my 70 year old mom asks, "Where can I get cheap ink cartridges?", I will add a bookmark to her Firefox. All remotely.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is a dupe, the topic is boring, the facts weren't checked. WE GET IT!!
I want a service that lets me se which sites other people recommend that I visit, based on the site that I'm currently on.
Could be solved by a mix of RSS-feed and Firefox plugin?
Anything like this exists?
Oh, and it should be easy as hell to input a new site, or it will never be popular...
Does del.icio.us (or the lesser known Open Source de.lirio.us) feature spammer protection? Or technorati tags, for that matter? How do people filter out spammers?
I keep thinking: "One of these days, the spammers are going to mess up this system."
I guess things like backflip are coming back, but this time the services are useful. For one thing del.icio.us and Flickr have shown that embracing the developer community makes sense.
I think for most people, me included, bookmarking is easier and often provides more useful information to others than blogging, there is clearly overlap.
Services such as Wists which is somewhere between Flickr and del.icio.us are an example of a bookmarking systems that are complimentary to del.icio.us allowing people to bookmark things such as gadgets, complete with thumbnail images.
Bookmarking is lazy blogging, but if someone is good at spotting things but not so good at writing I'd much rather read what excites someone via their bookmarks than wade through their blog postings.