Why Social Bookmarking
Anyone and everyone can participate in social bookmarking, whether they are individuals or corporations. It is not a complex mechanism and can be easily understood and learnt. It is most useful whenever there is a requirement to collect and share information with other individuals or groups of people having similar tastes and interests. It gives an opportunity for the users to comment, suggest alternatives or reinforce the information provided or express dissent. This becomes especially important while researching papers because seemingly unconnected links and tags can provide startling insights and discoveries. A ‘meeting of minds’ becomes possible, especially if the social bookmarking is done within closed / private groups of individuals. There is a drawback to this, because the values of the group may be skewed or biased against or for something, which may not be agreeable to another group of people or an individual. Another downside is that poor classification of tags or inconsistencies can lead to incomplete or disjointed information being made available on that site. Absence of hierarchical relationships for tags is another concern, although a number of these problems dissipate over time as the distribution of tags used to describe web resources tend to coalesce and a simple vocabulary emerges which is common across all users. There is also the headache of having to store and update information at another site for those using social bookmarking sites.
There are a number of reasons why social bookmarking is superior in many ways over the search engine spiders (which work on automatic resource location and classification software). These include the fact that speed of indexing and tagging is often done earlier by a person than the browser’s spider. Understanding and appropriateness of the source content is definitely better as the tag based classification is done by people rather than software. Consolidation and organisation of a number of bookmarks is better in social bookmarking as also sharing between contacts. Ranking of the resource is done based on number of bookmarks and not the number of links, resulting in proper weightage being given for relevance and popularity.
The resources for online services are undergoing dramatic changes and social bookmarking is a comparatively recent phenomenon. It is entirely possible that the experiences garnered from this concept the function and design of database will change to better manage data and information.
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