Social Bookmarking
What is Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking is a way to store, organize, and manage the URLs of webpages on the Internet. Most social bookmarking sites use informal tags -- user generated keywords that describe the bookmarked sites. Using tags makes it easy to find what you've bookmarked and to group information together.
Social bookmarking is "social" because you can share your bookmarks with other Internet users and see what other users are bookmarking. Other social features of social bookmarking sites include the ability to subscribe to tags (via RSS feeds), the formation of groups and discussion boards, and "friend" or "fan" features that allow you to follow what specific users post as bookmarks.
Social citation is the same idea as social bookmarking, but used for journal citations instead of websites. It is widely used in scientific research and other academic areas.
For a quick and informative video on social bookmarking, check out "Social Bookmarking in Plain English" on YouTube.
Why Use It?
Social bookmarking can be used for organizing research and discovering new information. If you're doing research with others, you can all share and contribute what you've found online, whether websites or journal articles. You can also use social bookmarking or social citation sites to discover what others have been researching -- it's like looking over someone's shoulder in the library!
Examples of Social Bookmarking & Related Sites
Delicious
- With over 5 million users, Delicious is one of the most popular social bookmarking sites on the Web. And it's free!
- Features include tags and tag rolls, tag subscriptions, networks of users, and a handy downloadable toolbar for quick bookmarking.
CiteULike
- Called "Delicious for academics" or "Facebook for PhDs," CiteULike is a free social citation tool that's widely used by scholarly researchers to collect and share citations for journal articles.
- When you use certain databases that are supported in CiteULike, the bibliographic information, such as author name and page, is automatically recorded for you to your CiteULike library.
Library Thing
- Like Delicious, but for books. Library Thing is one of the most "social" of all of the social bookmarking related sites.
- A basic account in Library Thing is free; paid subscriptions are available for even more space to catalog your books.
Want more? Here's an extensive list of social bookmarking and related sites from Wikipedia.
links checked 9/09 (aeb)