RevenBlog

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is, according to Wikipedia, “an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize (see folksonomy) a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others. – a personal knowledge management tool.”

While this definition is pretty accurate and succinct, it cannot (like all definitions) communicate what its subject actually is. No definition can form an adequate interpretation in your mind of what social bookmarking actually is. Specifically in this case, while calling social bookmarking “a personal knowledge management tool” seems like a tight description, it misleads on the power and use of social bookmarking. The phrase overstates the practical function social bookmarking can play in our lives in terms of management of information, and it neglects all together what I see as the more affecting aspect of social bookmarking – its use as a web navigation tool.

Just before writing these paragraphs, I went to StumbleUpon.com, clicked the word “Music”, saw an image and short description of a website that I thought was interesting, clicked to view, was absolutely blown away by what I saw, read a little more about the project, used the tool available there, decided that I would be working this tool into my every week, if not every day, experience, and left the site to come here to this writing area on my computer. And I’m very pleased about the whole thing. This all happened in about 8 minutes.

Yet, when I want to find something specific, I use Google.com. Google is brilliant in its elegance – a singular tool residing on the page (unless you’ve dressed up your Google, so to speak). Singular in purpose and terrific at it, like a pen. But that purpose is not always your purpose, right. Sometimes your purpose is not to search for something specific, but to return to a place you’ve been, or to stumble upon something new. (The aptness of “stumble upon” to describe the desire/activity at hand is a testament to the effective naming of StumbleUpon.com.)

Your browser, most likely, provides you with a “Favorites” or “Bookmarks”, but what a tedious task it is to actually use that tool with any frequency. If you are viewing many interesting websites that you would like to return to, and you are adding them to your list regularly, then sooner or later, you’re going to have a logistic and usability mess on your hands.

Many people use Google or Yahoo or MSN as both their search tool and their bookmarking tool. They just type in a specific search to bring up the website that they are wanting to return to. It’s faster to just search it again than to use the “Favorites” or “Bookmarks” option. Though Search evolves, the consistency of results is desirable in many ways – even necessary to the way we use it.

But what if you want to discover something new? What if you want to type in “music” or “improve my real estate business” and get something different than last time. What if you only want to know people’s thoughts on an issue, not weed through a list of services, products for sale, and directories? When you are using a search engine, how often do you really discover something unexpected? That’s not its function. It’s function is to find the expected, the desired. I want X; go find it please.
So, yes, granted, social bookmarking definitely allows an enhanced experience in terms of managing websites that you would like to return to, thus, yes, “a personal knowledge management tool” is accurate to a degree. But I argue that the what makes social bookmarking so powerful and significant is the radically different (from Search) experience it presents as a web navigation tool. Search was revolutionary. So, may be social bookmarking. It’s not your handy little black book. It’s a whole world.

View a collection of blurbs and comments about sites that can be classified as social bookmarking sites (or at least in similar or sub genres) at Marshal’s Corner.