Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarks and Tagging
With the advent of the first online social bookmarking service delicious.com and Diigo, the terms tagging, folksonomy, and social media entered the lexicon. Social knowledge media are another instance of a way to grow valuable public goods from the aggregate self-interested actions of many people; the kind of self-interest that adds up to more for everyone, as manifested by Wikipedia or Open Source and Free software, is enabled when digital networks lower a barrier to collective action: Html lowered the barriers to widespread participation in the Internet and allowed millions of individuals to create their own webpages; their linked pages added up to the Web. Blogging software lowered the barrier to frequent web publishing; millions of blogs added up to the blogosphere. Wikis lowered the barrier to group authorship and Wikipedia emerged. Social bookmarking and phototagging lowered the barrier to participation in creating knowledge together, and in something most people didn't think about before they had the power to participate: classification. When you go to the library, specialists have already classified the arrangement of books for you. Most classification systems for large, complex collections of objects are hierarchical: Humans are a subspecies of primates, within the category of mammals, which is subsumed under the category of animals.
Tagging eliminates both the specialists and the classification hierarchies: when you bookmark a page with a social bookmarking service such as Diigo, you design your own classifications -- "tags" -- of any name, and in any number, you'd like. You could bookmark the page you are reading now and assign any or all of the following tags: participatory_media, learning, tagging, social.bookmarking, diigo, knowledge, information, miscellaneous. Although tagging can be done privately, the great new added affordance of social media is the ability to share tags with a designated group or with everybody. Together, the aggregated tags of a sufficiently large population become a valuable public resource with virtually no provisioning cost -- we all go about our daily browsing, marking the websites and photos we want to remember, and adding annotations. That's a kind of knowledge bookkeeping that we each engage in for our own individual purposes. When we expose our decisions to others, and they reciprocate, the aggregation of our decisions creates a new resource. When ou multiply that act sufficiently, each tag becomes a repository of collective judgement about what is worth noting in relation to the tag. If you want to know more than you already know about tagging, see what everyone else things is worth marking: the diigo tag for tagging, for example, https://www.diigo.com/tag/tagging , constitutes a rich resource for anyone who wants to quickly browse existing sites that relate to tagging.
Another social affordance of tagging comes in when the service tells you that 180 other people have bookmarked the same site and allows you to see what else those other people have bookmarked, what other people have bookmarked under the tags you assigned, and to subscribe to future bookmarks from either designated people or tags. When the population of taggers and tagged items grows big enough, collaborative filtering algorithms make it possible for the system to make recommendations to users, based on their history of use.
When a group decides upon shared tags and uses social bookmarking for collaborative knowledge-gathering, social bookmarking can become a powerful collective intelligence tool.