Recently, a range of internet solutions, collectively known as 'social bookmarking’, have been developed that enable users to organise what they have found on the internet in ways that are immensely useful to the individual user of the web. This article porvides an explanation of the basics of this new technology that can potentially be as transformative in the way that we all use the web as Google was.( download this article as pdf).

“Now where the heck did I find that amazing page on soil maps I told Helen I’d send her?”

You’ve done some web research about soils and now you can’t remember what you did with the information. “I swore I saved it as a Favourite [or Bookmark, depending on your browser], but I’ve got so many flipping Favourites these days, I’ll never find it again...”

Eventually find the link, but only to discover that when you paste the URL into your browser’s address bar, the page itself has disappeared from the internet entirely, like odd socks that vanish from a dryer, decamped to some Arcadia or Elysian Fields for single, unpaired socks and dematerialized webpages, where they cavort in righteous beatitude, unsullied by be-athlete’s-footed human feet or the caprices of faddish, directionless internauts.

There is simply so much information out there that even the casual web surfer – never mind a researcher – has to deal with a crushing information overload. Compounding this problem, thousands of webpages regularly seem to just vanish into the ether. Information that remains useful to you is now lost forever.

Social bookmarking

In the last couple of years, however, a range of solutions, collectively known as ‘social bookmarking’, have been developed that enable users to organise what they have found on the internet in ways that are immensely useful to the individual web researcher.

Social bookmarking services, such as Delicious or Furl, allow users to save and categorise links to webpages (URLs) to what essentially is a giant public bookmark archive whose elements are accessible from any computer, by anyone. In short, you save your bookmarks to a place where anyone can see them and you can see those of anyone else.

At first glance this may not sound terribly revolutionary, and you may not even like the idea of having everyone see your bookmarks, but this very simple technology is potentially as transformative in the way that we all use the web as Google was.

Normally, we save a useful link in our Favourites (if we use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as our browser) or Bookmarks (if we use Firefox, Safari or Opera) (1), but the more bookmarks we save, the more unwieldy our collection becomes. Very often we need to save one particular webpage, not an entire site and for this, bookmarks are inefficient.

Frequently, we don’t bother to save the URL at all and just hope to be able to find it again via Google the next time we need it. For anyone whose work involves web research on a regular basis, this is incredibly inefficient, deeply frustrating and, worst of all, represents hours and hours of lost work.

Tagging

Bookmarking is what we all do when we save the URL of webpages to our bookmarks on our own compute. Social bookmarking is the practice of saving the URLs of webpages to a public website and ‘tagging’ them with descriptive keywords.

This enables you to save and ‘file’ any individual webpage without having to clutter up your bookmarks with hundreds or thousands of links. Think of social bookmarking as an online filing cabinet, and the keywords, or ‘tags’, you apply to each saved URL as the folders within your bookmarks, but much more dynamic.

Three such public websites, or social bookmarking services, which are probably the most useful to individuals working for NGOs are Delicious (2), Furl and CiteULike. There are many similar services, however, and there are other services that are not strictly social bookmarkers, such as online photo depository Flickr or blog search engine Technorati that incorporate tagging as well.

How it works – ‘De.licio.us’

Let’s say you wanted to save the European Digital Soil Maps of the World webpage to Delicious. Having signed up (for free) to Delicious, you download a small programme, an extension to your browser, that gives it an additional button that sits next to back, forward, refresh, stop and home buttons.

When you come across a site you want to save, such as the soil map, to your online filing cabinet, click the Delicious button. A dialogue box pops up asking you to apply keywords, or ‘tags’ to the URL that you are about to save.

If you were to save the same page to your old bookmarks in your browser, you would have had to decide which folder to file it under. In my own bookmarks on my own computer, I could have filed it under ‘soils’ or ‘maps’ or ‘development’ or ‘agriculture’ or ‘Europe’. But later on, when it came time to find the site again, I just know I would be saying to myself, ‘Now, which folder was it? Was it ‘soils’ or was it ‘maps’? Although, knowing me, I most likely would have filed it under something far too broad and indescriptive, like ‘Europe’, or worse, would have actually accidentally saved it under ‘new recipes to try’ or ‘reggae’). The site would be lost in my bookmarks, as irretrievable as a mislaid baseball card in a teenager’s closet.

With social bookmarking, you tag the URL with as many descriptors as you like, because items regularly fall into more than one category. The aforementioned ‘Europe’, ‘soils’, ‘maps’, ‘development’ and ‘agriculture would be as good as any.

Then, later on, when you want to retrieve the webpage, you simply enter into the search field on your Delicious homepage whichever words you think best describe the item, or you could click on one of the tags themselves (which appear on the right-hand side of the screen) and any pages you’ve saved with those tags will be returned to you. Even if you don’t remember all of the tags, it is quite likely you will remember a couple of them or just one. You never have to lose where you put a webpage URL ever again!

Furl – no more webpages vanishing into the ether

Going one better than Delicious, Furl – one of the original and still amongst the best social bookmarking services – allows users to save a copy of the entire tagged webpage, not merely the URL, so even if the webpage vanishes for ever into the ether (or sock heaven), a copy remains available in the user’s Furl archives. Even better, as whole pages are saved (Furl currently allows users to save up to 5GB’s worth of pages), one does not simply have to search via tags, but via full text searching of one’s archive.

Furl also allows users to attach other metadata than tags to saved items, such as a rating of the item from 1 to 5, a short clipping from the item, or a full text comment from the user. The service also permits the export of saved items as bibliographic citations (MLA, APA, Chicago, and CBE). Furthermore, as well as adding keywords/tags, one saves items under different ‘topics’, which act more like folders than tags do, making Furl a good midway point for someone who is not yet wholly comfortable with how tagging works.

If social bookmarking were just an online filing cabinet, it would be impressive enough, but the fact that the URLs are saved to a public website makes the whole proposition so much more powerful and even more useful to a researcher.

Peering over the fence at your neighbour

Firstly, as these social bookmarks are saved to a public website, this information is retrievable from any computer, not just your own. This also means, however, that what you have saved is visible to anyone else, and what anyone else has saved visible to you. When you click on your ‘soils’ tag, you also have the option of seeing all the items anyone else has tagged with the same keyword.

Now, ‘soils’ is fairly broad, so let’s say you’re looking for something about soils in Venezuela. When you enter those two keywords into your search, returned to you will be a list of items that anyone else has tagged with the same keywords.

Better yet, if someone else has tagged an item with those two keywords, it is highly likely that they will have something else of interest to you, so you can also click on that person’s username and see what else they have saved, probably finding something related to your own researches, but perhaps something you didn’t initially think of, taking you off down other interesting, previously unconsidered paths.

Alternately, when you tag an item, you can see a list of who else tagged the same item as you. Users on that list may also have similar research interests to you, offering another avenue of investigating someone else’s web research. (You can even ‘subscribe’ to someone else’s saved items via RSS the way you would subscribe to a blog or any other news source, regularly updating yourself with the results of other people’s research!)

Essentially, you are ‘peering over the fence at your neighbour’ – finding what has interested other like-minded researchers and using what they have found.

At the same time, if one is a little uncomfortable with the publicness of one’s archive, in Furl one can keep it partially or entirely private, an option which just this week (20 March, 2006) was introduced for Delicious users.

Bookmarkers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your links (and socks).

by Leigh Phillips, science writer, Contactivity bv, Leiden

March 2006

Notes:

(1) For simplicity’s sake, this article will hereafter just use the term ‘bookmark’ to describe both Bookmarks and Favourites

(2) The site actually punctuates itself ‘De.licio.us’, but this is a pain in the arse to type.

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