Social Bookmarking Basics
The concept of bookmarking web pages has been with us since the first web browsers. However, the bookmarking functions within today’s browsers are still quite primitive, restricting the user to a private set of bookmarks associated with one browser or PC. Some desktop software has been developed to extend this functionality (e.g. more flexibility, synchronization and customization) but with limited distribution. In the mean time, tagging – the unstructured classification of online information – and RSS encourage people to tag and share interesting web pages with others, in the form of social bookmarking.
Social bookmarking services allow people to post links to web pages that they find useful or interesting, either for their own private reference or to share with others. In many cases they employ user-generated non-hierarchical keyword categorization systems (also known as folksonomies, in contrast to the tightly controlled taxonomies) where people tag their bookmarks with freely chosen keywords.
Why use Link Directories or Bookmarks in the Enterprise
In business, social bookmarking act as part of knowledge management or collective intelligence strategies and can be used to collect all kinds of employee-contributed corporate intelligence – from research information and consumer insight to product ideas and news coverage.
Employees in many organizations are already using public social bookmarking services, although this has an inherent problem. By sharing information designed for internal consumption in a public space, employees can unwittingly expose potentially sensitive information to the outside world in the form of URLs and tags. An employee might tag a competitor’s website with the keyword ‘acquisition’, for example. Given that it is not very difficult to trace online identity nowadays, it is not impossible that the competitor could see that tag and work out the company that the contributor works for. It’s an extreme example, but it illustrates some of the dangers involved in using social software designed for mass consumer use to share information intended purely for internal consumption.
Bookmarking Usage
Many information architects and knowledge management professionals baulk at the thought of users generating the metadata on which their classification systems get based. Users save links to content (web pages) they want to remember and/or share. Best practices recommend users to tag each link with words that describe the meaning of the content, which then serve not only as an organizational structure, but also are used to navigate and discover relevant content.
Market Research and Cataloguing
In the enterprise, social cataloguing has endless possibilities. Any type of corporate data – such as competitor intelligence, supplier recommendations, or contact information – could be handed over to employees for collective management rather than relying on a single data owner or administrator and outdated data collection techniques.
Content discovery
By adding tags to links, a folksonomy emerges. This communicates the context and categorization, which may not have been seen through a more formalized taxonomy-driven viewpoint or a single person's perspective. Users can navigate content by selecting everything associated with a particular tag and discover links related to their work.
