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Social Bookmarking: The Race to Be Famous or a Tool?

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Saved by 16 people (0 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-08-03


Public Sticky notes

Let me be blunt. Social bookmarking does have a few values in my eyes. Past that, it moves quickly into wasted time.

Value:

-Compiling sets of links for a project.

-Storing, sorting and organizing my own personal bookmarks.

-Outputting a stream of links used to build a paper, presentation, podcast or blog posting.

-Utilizing tags to quickly look at filtered information.


Waste:

-The need to bookmark everything I visit. I could have just as easily sat there and watched you browse the Web all day.

-Visiting the most popular page on social bookmarking sites. This becomes the game where if they save it, I should too.

-Uploading every bookmark I have ever made since I was 12. This is called
oversharing, learn that word.

-Finding out that people do not understand tagging.

Highlighted by jwalzer

Uploading every bookmark I have ever made since I was 12. This is called
oversharing, learn that word.

Highlighted by drthomasho

However, here is where the dynamic changes. The new shift in social software brings enterprises in the fold by offering the same social bookmarking abilities to companies. Software provided by IBM/Lotus, Microsoft and a growing list of others are fighting to bring taxonomy order to how users spend their time on the Internet while at work.

Highlighted by jwalzer

Today there are literally hundreds of personal social bookmarking sites in use.

Highlighted by jamescochran

Does the fact that someone bookmarks a site begin to make them an expert in that topic?

Highlighted by gardnerr

But if I start tagging and bookmarking sites that pertain to the topic, I suddenly have followers and become a leader of knowledge in that taxonomy area.

The real question begs: Are all these shared and tagged bookmarks becoming a useful tool to anyone?

Highlighted by jwalzer

The race on every type of social network, bookmarking or not, to be one of the most popular has become time consuming not only for the person involved. Bring this feature into a corporation and you begin to see a loss of productivity. Being known as a top linker, Twitterer, community member or news article junkie is too much to pass up.

Highlighted by jwalzer

If the users are not taught the value in providing and finding links, it becomes a social station wagon crammed with stuff that you will never need or find again until you sell off the car.

Highlighted by jwalzer

So what data actually sits out in the social bookmarking sites? Some of it is quite useful if you are working on a specific topic and it is tagged properly.

Highlighted by jwalzer

How does the social bookmarking site differ? I can drill into a tag, presuming it is done properly and find information quickly that has been filtered. Tagging is an art; a skill; and a dream. No one really gets trained in tagging and most companies never build a starter taxonomy kit properly. You end up with random misspellings, abbreviations and merged or underscored word sets everywhere.

Highlighted by jwalzer