Social Web/Appendix/Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking and Tagging

Bookmarks exist since the start of the internet. Yahoo in the beginning was nothing but a collection of bookmarks. All of us keep bookmarks, some in our favorite browsers, some as simple text or html files, and some of us share them and tag them.

Social Bookmarks

Bookmarking services such as Delicious (www.delicious.com) allow you to store, manage, organize and search bookmarks to internet resources (usually web pages) online . A central aspect is the tagging: you describe a resource with either a word, words or a sentence. When many people do that, then this collection of tags is called folksonomy. Tagging is actually a very valuable service, which help especially search engines in providing better search results. This is actually a form of ’human computing’.

Delicious is one of the more popular social bookmarking services, others are StumbleUpon, MisterWong and many more.

Activity:

• Go to the Delicious web site (www.delicious.com) and search for ’3d printers’. Note that it can be used like a human-powered search engine.
• A nice way to visualize tag relationships (and hence folksonomy) can be done with the Del.icio.us tag browser (http://www.hubmed.org/touchgraphs/deltags.php).

Social News

Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/) was one of the first social news websites , where users submit stories and editors pick the best stories for the front page. Digg (http://digg.com/) took that idea further, and instead of editors used a voting system. Users can ’digg’ (i.e. like) or ’bury’ (i.e. dislike) articles. Other popular social news sites are Reddit and Newsvine. A similar idea is behind Facebooks’s ’Like’ button, Google’s ’+1’ or the ’Tweet’ button from Twitter.

Activity:

• Visit Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/) and read some of the stories posted there. If you have a real interesting story to tell, then you may also post one to Slashdot. If you do, and if makes it to the front page, tell us, you will get an immediate ’A’ for the class!
• Go to one of the large news web sites, such as CNN, BBC World, or Spiegel Online. Click on one of the featured articles and look for the ’Share’ button or small icons for the respective web sites such as Delicious or Digg. Click on one to see what happens.

Assignments

Ex.1: Bookmarking

For this class start an account on Delicious or MisterWong or similar bookmarking service. During this semester, collect and share links related or unrelated to this class.

References

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