Social Bookmarking and Social Search
Social Bookmarking combines keeping bookmarks online and sharing your collection with other users. Tagging the page with keywords to describe what it is about adds value for others. Some people tag well - especially librarians who have built substantial collections at decious.com. Tags, even when poorly done, can give other users a sense of the page and might be good enough for finding more. The folder scheme that people build up with their labels is called a folksonomy. Unfortunately, spammers get into this too and are the spoilers.
Sections on this page
Social Bookmarking | Social Search |
Social Bookmarking
The best known of the social bookmarking tools is del.icio.us but there are several others that have strong user bases.
del.icio.us WSG Pick
del.icio.us is an excellent starting point for finding out what other people think are good pages on a topic.
1. Go to the site and search for tagging.
2. See the list of articles and sites on the first page of results. Note
especially the number of people who have saved the item, and the other
tags they used.
3. Click on "see all bookmarks tagged: tagging", to get a new
page with only those with that tag along with other search aids.
TIP: Another method is to enter del.icio.us/tag/tagging - this goes directly to a page of results where tagging is the tag.
You can view entire collections such as mine at websearchlady and subscribe to tags or users.
Diigo Added Dec 2009 WSG Pick
Diigo is a personal research tool. It goes well beyond social bookmarking to include archiving of web pages (including pdfs), searching those pages, and highlighting and adding sticky notes.
There is also a strong social side. Users can join interest groups to benefit from what others find and comment on and contribute. They may also create a private or a public group - great for team work - and run threaded discussions. Educators can open free premium accounts for their classes to use group bookmarks with annotations and group forums.
Take the three
video tours on using Diigo for research, sharing, and collaboration.
Diigo is well connected: you can join with your account at Facebook, Yahoo, Google, or Twitter. Works on an iPhone too.
StumbleUpon WSG Pick
Benefit from discoveries that others make and add your own. Browse by topic, and get recomemndations based on what you save. Have StumbleUpon ratings show in search results from Google, Ask, Bing, AOL and Yahoo. Find other stumblers and share easily with friends. Get greatest value from installing the toolbar to your browser.
Take the video
tour.
Zigtag (www.zigtag.com) Added Feb 2009
This new social bookmarking tool allows sharing with friends, topical groups, or everyone using Zigtag. It's most remarkable feature is the facility to define a tag (and for people to discuss that definition). As you tag an item or browse items, the tag shows with its description. This could make Zigtag very competitive with delicious.
Social Search
Social bookmarking is just one aspect of social search that has spread across the Web whereby people vote on stories or search results, add comments, share discoveries and build collections, and even spend their free time answering questions. It's hard to say how good these are as search tools, but presumably they will do well enough for popular topics. Here are a few of the search services that have gathered a substantial following.
1. Guides
Mahalo (www.mahalo.com)
At Mahalo people collect and organize better quality resources on topics that will match fairly well to search terms. This has become a combination how-to centre and an answers place. The home page is mostly about news and buzz and popular pages. Mahalo is aimed at the popular topics of travel, sports, fashion, politics, but you may find other material when you search topic pages. This page on Library Thing, a social bookmarking and networking site for bibliophiles, is an example of the variety of resources assembled on a topic. Mahalo also organizes pages by category as you can see from this one on books - but it makes it impossible to find these. This is really a place for people who want to participate, not those who just want to browse.
Squidoo (http://www.squidoo.com/browse/homepage)
Squidoo invites people to create a "lens" on a topic or issue. Seth Godin, the guru who founded it, envisions it becoming "handbuilt catalog of the best stuff online". People are invited to build a lens instead of creating their own website. There is everything and the kitchensink here - it might have what you need but do a quality check to confirm that the lens is reliable and trustworthy. Browse from the Squidoo Top 100 Page (http://www.squidoo.com/browse/top_lenses).
2. News Stories
Digg may be the most popular of several sites where registered users can "blog" articles they read - bookmark it, add comments, rank it. The avid digger can establish a substantial collection of articles and reputation. The ranking shows quickly in the numerical count of diggs. You can have these delivered through email, rss, and text to phone, and get recommendations based on what you digg. But most of all join and start digging articles.
Popurls.com WSG Pick
This collection of social news captures the web buzz based on what people are saving and tagging in news, videos, photos, and more. Look there first for your social-media-information-jolt of the day.
3. Search Engine - Rating results or Commenting
Sproose (www.sproose.com)
When you register at Sproose you can search and vote, and as results receive more votes for a given query they appear higher on the results page. You can also add comments to a result or trash it; and save the voting history to share with others who have similar interests. Sproose has web search and video search.
Google SearchWiki Updated Dec 2009
Google's personal search has social features by which signed-in Google account holders can re-rank results (a form of voting), add comments (which will be seen by all), and remove results. These actions can benefit you later when you run a similar search. As well, you can see the ratings and comments done by others. Described well by Danny Sullivan in iGoogle SearchWiki 101: An Illustrated Guide.
Google added Sidewiki to the Google Toolbar to make it easier to comment on pages while surfing the web - but you have to be comfortable with Google tracking what you look at. Details about this are in Danny Sullivan's Google Sidewiki Allows Anyone To Comment About Any Site (Sept 23, 2009)
Hard to know if either of these will develop into strong social search tools. However, Google also has a Social Search experiment to find content written by your social circle of GMail contacts and contacts on social sites like Twitter. Introducing Google Social Search (October 26, 2009)
4. Answers
ChaCha.com (For Mobile Phone Users)
ChaCha has moved into being a human-powered mobile answer service - quick to help people who are on the run and have their "mobile phone device" with them. You can see the live questions at the chacha site. It's free but you must register to talk to a guide.
WikiAnswers (wiki.answers.com)
Answers.com is building a knowledge database at this Wiki through contributions of visitors asking, answering, and editing in the wiki style. Categories are managed by "supervisors".
Yahoo Answers (US and Canada) is its own social world - some would say shallow - but many congregate here to ask and answer questions. It's not a fount of knowledge, but there might be useful nugget. Otherwise, just go with the experience.
Where to next?
With search engines you search words on all the web pages. Learn more about Using Search Engines.