| Share research with social bookmarks Anyone who has ever used an Internet search engine knows that it can be a convenient and powerful tool for research. Unfortunately, it can take time to separate the good search “hits” from the bad. Most people add sites that they find to be informative to a list of personal bookmarks or favorites. The people who spend the most time researching a given topic will likely have a collection of the best Web sites available for that topic saved in their bookmark collection. Imagine a group of scholars easily sharing their best bookmarks by topic; even ranking and commenting on specific Web sites and resources. This type of bookmark sharing is growing more popular through Web sites like http://del.icio.us and http://www.furl.net. The problem with conventional Web browser bookmarks is that they are a private collection of Web site links saved locally to one computer. You can copy bookmark files and folders between multiple computers and even publish a copy on the Web; but keeping different copies synchronized is a manual process. Online bookmark services have been around for years. These Web sites make it possible to update online bookmarks as easily as one can update their local bookmarks. A recent development in these services is the ability to categorize a bookmarked Web site with one or more keywords that other individuals have used to describe sites they have bookmarked as well. Social bookmark sites like http://del.icio.us will even suggest popular keywords. If you categorize a bookmark under “photography,” other suggested categories might include “art,” “photos,” “PhotoShop,” etc. A numerical counter will tell you how many other people have bookmarked a Web site, and bookmarks for a given category can be sorted by popularity. The site http://www.furl.net lets individuals rank Web sites they have bookmarked. Furl also can save private copies of Web pages for you. This can be useful if you are concerned about a Web page disappearing from the Internet. “Folksonomy” is a new term that describes open efforts to categorize information using keywords selected by individuals in a local or global community. Just as social bookmark sites allow individuals to freely categorize Web sites, http://www.flickr.com is an example of a service that allows individuals to freely categorize and annotate photographic images. http://www.43things.com is a site that lets people categorize and share common goals; like a blog combined with a to-do list. There is no limit to the number of keywords that can be used to categorize information, so on a global level these sites can be almost as overwhelming as a conventional search engine. Various ranking methods help, and some sites allow special interest groups to be formed in order to share common bookmarks and information on a smaller scale. All of the sites mentioned in this article offer free accounts and do not require personal information beyond an e-mail address to confirm membership. These specific sites are not known for generating spam, but it always is a good idea to use a secondary e-mail address whenever you sign up for any service. These sites also allow you to choose whether or not a bookmark or photograph is private. If you choose to make all of your bookmarks private, sites like these are still useful for accessing your bookmarks from any computer. These sites also offer RSS (Really Simple Syndication) so you can subscribe to a category, group, or individual, and receive alerts in your RSS reader whenever new information is posted. —MU |
