Wednesday, June 1, 2011

ASSIGNMENT 3b - SOCIAL SOFTWARE AND WEB 2.00

3b - Social bookmarking

Nowadays, bookmarks (favorites) that you used to have on your computer have moved on to the Web as well. Instead of having different bookmarks on different computers (work/school/home) it is not only possible to access your personal bookmarks from any computer, you can also access others' bookmarks and share bookmarks with your friends/colleagues/pupils.
Find a few social bookmarking sites and try to figure out what makes each site unique. Compare to regular browser-based bookmarks (favorites). Make up a list of evaluative criteria and compare two or more social bookmarking services.
Based on your evaluation, pick a social bookmarking site to use. Transfer your local bookmarks (at least parts of them) to the bookmarking site of your choice (how can this be done?).
Present your evaluative report, using text, tables and images (screenshots) in the same way as in assignment 3a.

You can find the PDF version of this Assignment (plus more tables and figures) at this address.

Social bookmarking


Regular browser-based bookmarks (favorites) vs. online bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a great tool to share links and stumbled upon valuable online contents. With online bookmarks, you get to access your favorite site anywhere at any PC. Aside from this, social bookmarking has proven to be viral in promoting online business.

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them. (wikipedia)
Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content (Golder and Huberman, 2005).

At old method of bookmarking, users had to use their computer’s web browsers to list their favorite online content. So they could not access to these lists when they use different computer sets. Nowadays social bookmarking websites have switched these lists into online bookmark lists which can accessible all around the world through all computers.



At social bookmarking websites descriptions can be added to these bookmarks in the form of tags, so users may recognize the content of the resource without needing to download them. Such descriptions may be comments, votes in favor of or against its quality, or tags that become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content"(wikipedia)

These bookmarks are usually public, however can be saved privately. They can be shared only with specified people or in the groups. They can be shared only inside certain networks, or around the World Wide Web. The authorized people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by categories or tags and via a search engine.

Most social bookmark services promote users to categorize the bookmarks with tags instead of the traditional browser based system of folders, even though a number of services feature a combination of folders and tags. These websites also allow viewing bookmarks linked with a specific tag, and include description and stats about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks (Arora, 2009).
Recently online bookmarking services provide web feeds like RSS or Atom for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allow subscribers have notifications for being aware of new added material as they are saved, shared, and tagged by others.

As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features (Watwood, 2007)

Google Bookmark vs. Delicious
Google Bookmarks



Introduction
There are many social bookmarking sites where you can store your useful links. Among these is the Google Bookmarks.
How does google introduce Google bookmark?

With Google Bookmarks, you'll be able to:
  • Save time with quick links to your favorite websites,
    Use 
    Web History to find the sites you visit frequently and bookmark your favorites. Use the Google Toolbar for quick access to your bookmarks and to easily create more. 
  • Get your bookmarks on any computer. No matter where you may be surfing the web, your bookmarks can stay with you just by signing in. 
  • Keep your bookmarks organized. Add searchable labels and notes to your bookmarks to find them easily and keep them organized. (front page, Google bookmark website)

The most important advantage of using Google bookmark is that this system was made by Google so it will be support with all Google’s software and materials. Google Bookmarks is available only to Google Account holders. This system was launched on 2005. Google Bookmarks allows people to bookmark online contents’ links then add labels or tags, and also notes.

Users can access their bookmarks from any computer when they sign in to their Gmail account. All shared links are searchable by using tags, notes and comments. However others cannot search your links if you put “private” label on them.

As mentioned before, all google application and software support the Google Bookmarks. Google toolbar also has tools enable users to easily create bookmarks and quickly access them. Bookmarks can also be created manually from the web interface, or by use of third-party tools such as Firefox extensions created for managing the user's Google Bookmarks account and keeping them synchronized to the browser's bookmarks (Duthel, 2008).

In addition there are lots of extensions which help users applying this website as easy as possible. For example a javascript function called Google Bookmark was created on the Firefox toolbar, which opens a window to keep the bookmark to the Google Bookmarks. This same function can be imported into other browsers as a bookmarklet.

Furthermore many websites will encourage bookmarking to Google Bookmarks through third party buttons on their websites, knowing that Google's search engine keeps tabs and considers these bookmarks significant in the results for public search (Hayman, 2007)

 
Features





Public / private / shared lists

There are three types of links and bookmarks at Google bookmarks. Private links are accessible only for account owner and nobody else can see them. Public lists are accessible through the search engines and everybody can see them. You and the person you invited him/her can access to shared lists.
By default, all labels are private. Nobody can see the labels you apply to a site.

By default, Lists are also private. However, you can choose to make your list public (so that anybody can find and view it), or to add collaborators. Collaborators can edit a list, but only you can change your sharing settings between public and private, change the list title, and delete the list (Google bookmark help).



Import / export bookmark

Google bookmark gives users the opportunity to import their bookmarks from its main competitor which is delicious.com. There is a special tool for importing bookmark from delicious to Google bookmark. Delicious credentials will not be stored or used after this import process is complete. Any data you have stored in Delicious will not be edited or deleted by this import process.

The users also can save and download all their bookmarks as an html page.


Revenue sources

Google Bookmark has no advertising plan and is supported by original google website and its revenue resources.

Rank

Since Google Bookmarks installed on Google website platform and works as a sub domain of Google.com, its rank belongs to the original google website which means there is no separate ranking for Google Bookmarks and we cannot consider any ranking base on major ranking systems like alexa.com.

 
Delicious




Introduction

Delicious (formerly del.icio.us, pronounced "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, then sold to AVOS Systems on April 27, 2011. It is a US base company and its headquartered located in Sunnyvale, California.

The "del.icio.us" domain name was a well known example of a domain hack, an unconventional combination of letters to form a word or phrase. Del.icio.us and delicio.us now redirect you to the new domain, delicious.com.(Golder and Huberman, 2005)

Features

Networks

Networks at this websites are easy ways to view all the bookmarks saved by interesting people, such as friends, coworkers, and favorite bloggers. After users add them to their Network, this page will collect and display all their recent bookmarks for users to enjoy.

To add a person to a Network, users should visit their bookmarks page and click Add to my Network from the top right of that page. Or, if they already know others username, then they can type them in by selecting Add a user to Network from the top right of this page.

Inbox

This is where user will find bookmarks that have been sent to him/her by other users. When you receive a bookmark, the little mail icon in the top right corner will let you know.

To send a bookmark to another person's Inbox, user should tag the bookmark with “for:” followed by their username, like “for:narimanhb”. That person might even send you one back!

If user adds people to a Network, it's even easier to send them bookmarks, because user can click those names to automatically add “for:” tags with usernames.

Subscriptions and RSS feed for Bookmarks

Subscriptions are a way to see the recent bookmarks that everybody has saved with the tags that you're interested in. After adding a tag to a user’s subscriptions, the latest bookmarks for that tag will appear on his/her page. Users can subscribe to multiple tags to create an automatically updated list of interesting bookmarks.

RSS feed is also available for all bookmarks and users can follow their favorite bookmarks.

Tag Cloud

At Tag cloud shows popularity of a tag. They are a list of tags where size reflects popularity



Search

Users can search all contents by using
  • ·         Search bookmarks: My bookmark/ popular/ recent
  • ·         Search People: My network/ go to a user
  • ·         Search tags: My tags/ My subscriptions

Import / export bookmark

Importing bookmark from other systems or browsers would have three steps as bellow:
  • ·         Save your browser bookmarks to a file
  • ·         Find bookmark file and add tags
  • ·         Import the file to Delicious
Exporting bookmarks is also available for users. The bookmarks can be downloaded as a HTML file. Users even can choose some bookmarks with specific tags.

 
Revenue resources

Delicious.com works with online advertising companies to provide consumers with advertising that is as relevant and useful as possible. Some of the online ads are served may be based on the content of the Web page users are visiting; some others may be based on registration information users provide; and other ads may be customized based on predictions about users interests generated from thier visits to other Web sites.

Rank

Base on Alexa.com(28th May 2011), three-month global traffic rank is 244. Visitors to the site spend roughly three minutes per visit to the site and 35 seconds per pageview. Compared with internet averages, the site appeals more to users who have postgraduate educations; its audience also tends to consist of childless men between the ages of 25 and 55 who have incomes under $100,000. 


You can find the PDF version of this Assignment (plus more tables and figures) at this address.
 

References

ARORA, J. 2009. Library 2.0: Innovative Technologies for Building Libraries of Tomorrow*.

DUTHEL, H. 2008. Google Inc. Services-Google Tools-What is Google?, Lulu. com.

GOLDER, S. & HUBERMAN, B. A. 2005. The structure of collaborative tagging systems. Arxiv preprint cs/0508082.

HAYMAN, S. Year. Folksonomies and Tagging. In, 2007. Citeseer.

WATWOOD, B. 2007. Instructional Uses of Social Bookmarking: Reflections and Questions. Romanian Journal of Social Informatics no, 8.

 My personal experiences at www.google.com/bookmarks and www.delicious.com


No comments:

Post a Comment