Social bookmarking and folksonomies for the baffled

What is a folksonomy?
A folksonomy (a folk taxonomy) is a system by which users are easily able to tag web-based content based on their own keywords, whether it's personal photos they've uploaded to Flickr, or a webpage that they've bookmarked in del.icio.us. The tags can then be used to filter piles of information – for example, so that you can see all the pictures of pie on the Flickr site.

Who's using them, and why?
Folksonomies are being used in a variety of contexts right across the web. For example, 43things is an online to-do list which uses tags to enable you to compare your own goals and outstanding tasks to other users'. TheThingsIWant enables you to keep a site-independent wish list which, through judicious tagging, can feed into community product reviews. eSnips takes the concept further, by adding hosting; users can upload up to 1GB of files (i.e. not just links), in any format (i.e. not just photos/images), for tagging and sharing with other users. 

In our own industry, the most relevant application is in social bookmarking, whereby users bookmark their favourite sites to a web-based profile, rather than to their browser's "favourites" folder. Having added contextual information (tags) to each page's bookmark, you can then link through to other users' bookmarks for that tag, and thus find other content which – and this is they key for many – has been defined as appropriate/relevant by a real, live, and probably appropriately qualified person. del.icio.us was the first social bookmarking site and is now supported by prestigious sites such as the Washington Post; several others have followed, many of which pay homage to del.icio.us both in concept and in name, for example, de.lirio.us (which is open source, and allows longer postings) and alpha site lib.rario.us (for uploading details of, and cataloguing, collections of books, music, DVDs and games).

The concept of social bookmarking has been further expanded by social citation tools such as CiteULike and Connotea, which enable researchers to add the citation information of articles they value into an online reference library – where they can be tagged and shared with like-minded users. This has obvious advantages over traditional reference management software:

  • it's free, so no licence is required
  • it's web-based, so no special software is necessary and reference libraries can be accessed from any internet-connected computer
  • it's easy to filter and retrieve relevant content from your library, because of the tags you've applied
  • it's automatically integrated with other users' libraries

This last point represents the real social and collaborative benefits. Becoming part of the citation community, and browsing other users' bookmarked content via tags, helps users to discover other relevant articles – in some usefully innovative ways. Many researchers and journalists are beginning to use tags to provide dynamic bibliographies for articles they publish online; by citing a link which will take users to their social bookmarks, authors can cite relevant content which they haven't yet located and which may not even have been published yet! For example, I can cite the resources I have used so far for this article by linking to my Connotea bookmarks with the tag "social bookmarking" . Today, there are 7 entries, but if someone were to read this article in some months' time and follow that same link, it could have grown to include bookmarks of many more articles on the subject, some of which might not yet exist.

By extension, if you were so taken by this article, and its bibliography, that you want to know what other articles I might read and bookmark on this subject, you could sign up for an RSS feed of articles I tag under "social bookmarking". This has the potential to replace the current habit of emailing URLs of interesting web content to groups of friends or colleagues: bookmark it, tag it with the appropriate key words, and encourage contacts to subscribe to RSS feeds for those of your tags which are appropriate to them. As users subscribe to each others' feeds, information is shared more efficiently, and the burden on our collective inboxes is further reduced (cue cheering).

How does Ingenta fit in?
Several social bookmarking services are configured to support intelligent bookmarking of IngentaConnect content, whereby our data fields are automatically mapped onto those of the service, ensuring quick and easy upload of a full metadata record. In some services, including CiteULike, peer-reviewed content is given greater prominence than non-peer-reviewed articles. Furthermore, CiteULike's programmer Richard Cameron is working on OpenURL compliancy, which will greatly enhance the value of this tool for academics with institutional full-text access rights.

Conclusions?
Social bookmarking is primarily a user-led initiative, and information professionals have some concerns about the folksonomies on which it is dependent – for example, that the fundamentally amateur nature of folksonomy tagging undermines the value of tools or services developed around it.  (This is not just professional snobbery; consider, for example, that professional taxonomies have identified and agreed on a standard vocabulary, whereas amateur folksonomies will encompass several different tag labels with essentially the same meaning. Users searching on a given tag will not get a comprehensive set of results).  Nonetheless, the value of web-based bookmarking, and the potential of collaborative discovery and cataloging, are generally recognised and applauded, so it is likely that we will see continued development leading to increasingly sophisticated social bookmarking/citation tools.

Sounds interesting. Where can I find out more?
 • Wikipedia's entries for folksonomy and social software
• My bookmarks for social bookmarking, folksonomy, social citations
• Butler, Declan. "'Thin blogs', RSS and 'social bookmarking'". Declan Butler, Reporter (blog at http://declanbutler.info/blog. December 2005.
• Dodds, Leigh. "Bookmarking Etiquette". Lost Boy (blog at http://www.ldodds.com/blog/). August 2005.
• Kroski, Ellyssa.  "The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging". InfoTangle (blog at http://infotangle.blogsome.com/). December 2005. Compares folksonomies with traditional taxonomies. A well-argued, well-illustrated analysis which nonetheless remains accessible to less knowledgeable readers, and contains a comprehensive bibliography which is useful for onward research.
• Macgregor, George and McCulloch, Emma. "Collaborative Tagging as a Knowledge Organisation and Resource Discovery Tool". Pre-print accepted for publication in Library Review, volume 55, number 5, 2006. More in-depth comparison of collaborative tagging and traditional controlled vocabularies.