How Does Social Bookmarking Work?
The basic concept of Web 2.0 is that it is user-directed and social bookmarking is a part of Web 2.0 so it is, of course, user directed. Social bookmarking is a way of organizing and categorizing information with the use of ‘tags’.
Tags are user generated and are based upon key words that identify the bookmark so this is a true user-directed way that information is organized and categorized.
When a bookmarked site is clicked on, the social bookmarking site identifies the person who created the bookmark and provides access to other sites that the same user has bookmarked.
Now, the person who created the bookmark and the tag is also provided information about how many times the link has been clicked on as well as who clicked on it.
This system makes it very easy for like-minded people to make social connections and to identify others who have the same interests. Over time a community of users develops.
As a community of users develops, they sometimes develop a very unique set of key words that define resources of common interest. These unique sets of keywords have come to be referred to as ‘folksonomy’.
Wikipedia defines the term, folksonomy as:
“Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories.
In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams.”
How will Social Bookmarking Impact the Web?
Actually, it is pretty clear right now that social bookmarking is having a huge impact on the way that information is being classified, categorized, stored and exchanged.
It is impossible to believe that in the future the impact will be even stronger. Web 1.0 was static but Web 2.0 is fluid. The face is ever changing.
The technology that social bookmarking is based upon is really rather simple…there isn’t anything complex about it. It is user friendly. The level of knowledge needed to gain huge benefits from social bookmarking is low.
People do not have to be computer gurus to make use of the technology at all. The technology is so simple and the system is so easy to use that it will continue to grow in popularity into the foreseeable future.
Because of this inevitable growth of social bookmarking and the easily used tagging of such things as multimedia files, it may well be just as inevitable that the design and function of databases themselves will also change drastically.
They may have to change just to be able to accommodate this new way of managing information.
How is Social Bookmarking Affecting Education?
Teaching and learning are the two components of education. The objective of transferring information and knowledge from one person to another person or a group of persons is being greatly affected by social bookmarking.
The exchange of information and the coming together of like-minded individuals into loosely knitted online communities are both impacting education as a whole.
For so many centuries education suffered from slow communication. Today the internet itself has greatly speeded up communication and social bookmarking has doubled that speed in the last few years.
Social bookmarking has created a method whereby bibliographies, papers, etc. can be easily and quickly shared and accessed by multiple people at the same time. These same resources can be altered or edited in real time.
Tags: Folksonomy, Bookmarking, Social Bookmarking, Web 2.0
